automusicography

MEDITATIONESMARTINI:

So I turned 30 this year, and started by trying to put together mix cds for everyone who came to my birthday party containing one amazing song from each of the years since 1980, when I was born. This quickly proved impossible, and ballooned out to 10 songs/year--a mighty playlist. So I did the first 300, and then I was so sad about not having anything on there from the '60s and '70s that I extended it back, and what I'm trying to say is now I have 500 of my favourite songs all ready to post in this space! Paralleling the Rolling Stone albums list in the other thread--I put mine together on Grooveshark, which meant certain things (all Beatles and solo Beatles songs; much Pink Floyd) were not available, but I still think it shows more discernment than theirs. Here we go!

1. The Shadows - Apache (1960)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pY-rPDwzM9M>

SLICKDPDX

Martin: I love it! Start a new thread dedicated to your list for our ease and pleasure.
MEDIATIONESMARTINI:

>417 Jesse_wiedinmyer: ha! all right, I'll strike out on my own.

And he did.

2. Sam Cooke - Chain GaaAAAaang (1960)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmZdvVnMXCc

I came to Sam Cooke via the Raveonettes, which is probably kind of a travesty, but even so.

3. John Coltrane - Giant Steps (1960)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kotK9FNEYU

At one time I believe this had the fastest changes of any song ever. (Probably somebody's beat it since, just to beat it?) We used to break ourselves trying to play it in jazz band.

4. Miles Davis - Concierto de Aranjuez (1960)

Dunno why it's in two parts, but:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rs-ALgkPUo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emd0vJfyk2E

Originally off this album it was a song called "Saeta" for me, because of the haunting trumpet and how it made me think of a girl named Reyna (that most Castilian of names) who I loved. But love faded and quality won.

I guess music threads are proliferating beyond all reason, but anyone else who wants to put together a year-over-year playlist, at least post it--I'd be so curious to see what kind of overlap there was.

I'd be more interested in seeing your list than the RS 500. Put your energies here; let's put the RS 500 on the backburner -- it got us here to your automusicographica -- and that's the important thing.

The Shadows vid is pretty cool. And, I highly recommend the Coltrane video for its animated music transcript. It really adds to the experience.

I like the Raveonettes. Sam Cooke too. Miles I am "eh" about. I think the idea of Miles is bigger than the reality.

Something a little different from Sam Cooke. Bring it on Home to Me. We used to rock the school bus singing this on the way home from school.

I envy you having put together your five hundred favorite songs. That would be so cool. I just play them as they pop into my head. I would never thought of that Same Cooke if you hadn't mentioned him above.

What a great memory Gene!

7 - Hands down one of my favorite songs.

>6 slickdpdx: those first two piano chords in "So What" alone will put Miles in my heart forever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEC8nqT6Rrk

but they're from the fifties:( If I extend this back to 1950 it will be so full of jazz, but for now here's--oh, actually, it's another jazz track!

5. Charles Mingus feat. Honi Gordon - Strollin' (1960):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igPerD1KmwQ

>7 geneg: well, not exactly my five hundred favourite songs, since it's ten a year; some years definitely were more crowded with candidates than others (1966, 1980, 1994, 2003). Conversely, some years (1961, 1975, 1990, 2000) were definitely kinda slow. But yeah, it's great and I listen to it every day and it elevates my mood. That Sam Cooke song you posted is glorious! Here's another glorious voice, who I looked affectionately on from an early age due to his resemblance to the Spider-Man villain Dr. Octopus (though it occurs to me know the causal relationship was probably Orbison-->Ock rather than the other way around).

6. Roy Orbison - Only the Lonely (1960):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdVtNIr_QvA&feature=related

Roy Orbison made me cry. I was having girlfriend troubles in the early sixties, a teen crush on a girl two years my junior, unrequited. This song was the story of my life at the time Crying.

I can still sing Only the Lonely with the radio without skipping or missing a beat. Dum dum dum dum be do wah, ou yea, yea, yea, yah, oh oh oh ohuuahhhh only the lonely ...

Roy Orbison came out of the Sam Phillips studios at about the same time Elvis moved over to RCA. He hit it big with a dance song Ooby-Dooby in 1956.

I know I'm posting a lot of songs here, and this is actually about Martin's list, but this stuff is right in my wheel house and I really can't help myself. I hope no one minds. When you get to the eighties I will fade back into the woodwork.

>12 geneg: no, no, no, for god's sake, post! welcome! I mostly just started this thread so as not to overwhelm the old ones. let's make this the "favourite or biographically significant songs + related anecdotes", or "songs 'n' stories" thread.

And yeah, Crying should have made my list too, I think. I like the way putting together the list on grooveshark (apologies for the spam) lets me change it at a whim too. I actually added this song just the other day after realizing I'd unconscionably forgotten it--our love dates back to 2004, when my friends made me a mix cd (as was the style at the time) on which each of them put a song to symbolize our friendship, and this was his. We later fell out fairly spectacularly, but Piaf helps me still think of him fondly:

7. Edith Piaf - Non, je ne regrette rien (1960)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3Kvu6Kgp88

Smokey really looks like Pharrell.

8. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles (1960)

What song?

The photo of Edith Piaf that accompanies the you tube link further above looks just like Andrea Martin of SCTV fame.

Very nice mix of Jazz and Rock 'n Roll. I like this list. But what about the folkies?

I am enjoying this. Can't wait to listen to more. Thanks.
#'s 1, 2, and 4 my favorites so far.

You want folkies? You want folkies? You can't handle the folkies! How about The Tijuana Jail.

Or this one - Everglades

Or some real folk music - Uncle Pen. I call this stuff white boy blues. Others call it bluegrass. I saw Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys in Dallas not too long before he died. it was in a small pub, Poor David's Pub for any of you familiar with Dallas. The opening act were a couple of high school girls and a friend of theirs, they called themselves The Dixie Chicks. When their set was over the blond with long hair and her high school boyfriend went into a dark corner and spent the rest of the time making out. Ah, those high school days, up against the lockers in the hall between classes. Hot! Hot! Hot! And to think, most of those gals are grandmothers now.

Or this.

Here's a taste of what my father called folk music - Deportee

Or these dulcet tones - East Virginia

Or Jean Ritchie - Shady Grove.

Did you have something specific in mind?

>15 slickdpdx: ha ha oops. It was Shop Around!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQGXa3FiXKM

>16 A_musing: There'll be a folkie or two coming, but I am so powerfully ignorant of all things, um, folk, especially in terms of that pre-Dylan late-'50s early '60s scene. And like, "Sloop John B", for example, is one of my faves, but like, the Weavers recorded it in the forties, the Kingston Trio in '58, and the Beach Boys version just doesn't beat out "God Only Knows", not to give away what's coming. (I'm limiting myself to one song per artist per year). I think imma have to extend this back some time at least to, like, 1945.

Would love if you would share some folkie wisdom/tunes!

Okay: 9. The Drifters - This Magic Moment (960)

This one's a bit of a cheat, because it should really be Lou Reed's version from the Lost Highway soundtrack. But what the hell, this version rules too, and it was a lot easier to find space for it in 1960 than 1996, when I was 16 and accordingly music-obsessed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A73f2AzKBAY

10. The Shirelles - Will You Love Me Tomorrow

The other night me and my roommate hung out and drank wine and gossipped and ate cookies and listened to girl groups and danced around the place to girl groups and talked about how adorable they were with all their tall hair and exquisite ensembles and sha-la-las. It was like we'd banned testosterone from the house. It was wonderful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbxxkwBQk_o

"Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" was written by Carole King when she worked in the Philadelphia version of Tin Pan Alley for Don Kirshner along with Barry Mann (her songwriting partner) and Neil Sedaka among others.

Here's the song that made me fall in love with The Drifters - Money Honey. You can tell the sonics in the early fifties weren't what they are today.

Here's one a little more representative - There Goes My Baby.

Ben E. King alone - Spanish Harlem.

Finally, some Drifters Christmas Music - White Christmas.

What about Gerry Goffin?

He was in that crowd, too, I think. Wasn't he the fellow Carole King married?

Yes, and they co-wrote I'm Into Something Good, The Locomotion, Go Away Little Girl, You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman, Pleasant Valley Sunday and Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow (and many many more!) Goffin wrote who put the bomp in the bomp etc. with Barry Mann.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerry_Goffin

Goffin wrote more hits after he and Carole split, too, including Theme from Mahogany and Saving All My Love for You.

Gene, That's what I'm talking 'bout. Now, I might throw in a dash of Sonny and Terry and some Howlin' Wolf, but that would really be pre-this period.

Do you mean Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee? White Boy Lost in the Blues. That's me.

Howlin' Wolf - Spoonful.

How about this? Down Home Shakedown.

I should be reading BK.

>18 geneg: nice, thanks for all that. I've always liked that Deportee song (but I had no idea it was that old!), and my mum used to sing me "Money Honey" all the time when I was little. "Spanish Harlem" hurt to leave off, but it was from the same album as "Stand by Me", so it had to be. That "Mary Don't You Weep" is beautiful too. Music! If anyone has any suggestions for books to read for people who want to get a sense of the pre-rock era in terms of the rise and fall, the stars, the intellectual movements, the underground, the social movements, the avant-garde, the shit they played at parties, the canonicity, what people loved, what it was actually like, do pass them on. I'm thinking of music books like Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces, like Lester Bangs's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, or like um Simon Reynolds's Energy Flash. Cultural criticism.

On to 1961!

11. The Shirelles (again!) - Baby It's You

Like I said, right? So cute!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8clnxViHdp8

12. The Marcels - Blue Moon

I don't normally get too much into doo-wop (I think they need less balance usually--more caterwauling, more bass), but this song just rules. (And the bass part is super prominent.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7giOrKYIwpQ

SOPRANO SAX NIIIIITE

13. The Tokens - Wimoweh (1961)

This is totally my favourite version of this song because of the waily soprano singer and the soprano sax.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LBmUwi6mEo

14. John Coltrane - Olé (1961)

Listen to this! It's ultramodern and incredible! Those floppy-haired hipsters with their beat music and their bippin' and their boppin'--they didn't know what the jazz was all about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hN5JpIG0B0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hN5JpIG0B0

>18 geneg: Gene,

As an old Deadhead, I LOVED those tunes!. It's great to see where ol' Jerry Garcia obtained his material.

15. The Marvelettes - Please Mr. Postman (1961)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nuEY6fQgzk

16. Del Shannon - Runaway (1961)

Check out this video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TLLcvWeiKw

Martin - anything by Coltane is automatically in a different class in my view.

Nice thread by the way.

Please Mr. Postman from the best cover band in all of rock n roll. There's never been a better cover band. If you can't take hijinks, the tune starts about 1:15 in.

Deliver de letter, de sooner de better.

I would have preferred an album cut, but the band keeps their music under close watch.

>31 geneg: the hijinx just make it sweeter, as far as I'm concerned. And yeah, they do clench their music in a tight fist--I note that the ads Apple has been barraging me with every time I start Safari for the last few days about the Beatles on itunes have not resulted in any of their songs trickling onto Grooveshark yet (which is why there are no Beatles recordings on this list).

17. Dion and the Belmonts - Runaround Sue (1961)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c49klxPex-k

When I was in grade 12 we did a big-deal canoe trip to Barkley Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island that was supposed to be like the culmination of our high-school experience, and it was amazing and beautiful and delicious and sexy and educational and togethermanshipfilled, and this was our #1 canoeing song.

Oh, and here's that 18. Ben E. King - Stand by Me (1961) you ordered. You guys wanna see a dead body?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmGQ5SlazJA

(both of these videos have the beginnings egregiously cut off, but I figure since at this point we're mostly dealing with songs that everybody-but-everybody knows, might as well post some sweet live performs.)

Rounding off 1961, the year of the Eichmann trial and the Bay of Pigs, a lady:

19. Connie Francis - Where the Boys are

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHZaFbwUHkc

and a Brit, or a bunch of Brits (but only one Sir!):

20 Cliff Richard & the Shadows - The Young Ones

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBuiTyIYpA8

On to '62! Finally a folkie!

21. Bob Dylan - Baby Let Me Follow You Down

only it's not on youtube! Dylan perhaps doing some protecting of his own? Here's Steve Earle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52ZlaiUaQ3E

but lest we get too liberal-pinko-draftdodger-folk-musician for our britches here, the Establishment strikes back:

22. Frankie Valli & the Four Seasons - Big Girls Don't Cry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2s54WNBwiI

23. Dionne Warwick - Don't Make Me Over

Some of these songs are mostly on here just because I don't know shit about the early '60s, but this one is an all-time fave, no hesitation, no apologies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFvLcCDvdEA

(Also, it's only a few seconds at the start, but did you hear that presenter's old-timey CBC accent? They don't make Canadians like that anymore.

And hey, it's Cliff Richard again!

24. Cliff Richard & the Shadows - Do You Wanna Dance?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO6uzDn-xnE

This si the version od Do You Want to Dance I grew up with. From 1958.

Here's a novelty song.
Something we don't have these days, I don't think. Listen for the sendup of Dion and the Belmonts at the end. The whole thing is pretty funny.

>35 geneg: whoa, I had no idea it was a cover! Nice.

And thanks for the other link--made my night. Wicked burn on the Kingston Trio too. Would Flight of the Conchords possibly qualify as its modern-day equivalent?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06AOTWgey74&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beQ9yChEcHw&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3omQikQYmgY&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_z5jU5nrlAo&feature=related

(and, for Enrique)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAgTpIiI2I&feature=related

Dude, I love that so much, I just made it my entire "About Me" on my profile page. Thank you, Mister Martini, for thinking of me! That song and video is impossibly perfect it's so perfect!

>37 absurdeist: Service is joy:)

25. Elvis Presley - I Can't Help Falling in Love with You (1962)

Came to this via the UB40 version, which is worse but more hilarious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSOZoaMaOzs

I like Flight of the Conchords very much and was quite disappointed when their show was canceled. There music is truly remarkable.

Elvis was at his very best between 1954 and 1956. He became too commercial right before he went into the Army. When I was in Vietnam I had a sergeant who had been one of Elvis' entourage in Germany.

The King of Rock 'n Roll - Mystery Train

And my favorite Elvis - I Was the One. I apologize if this is a double posting. I posted this song before.

Rockin' Elvis - Teddy Bear and Wear My Ring.

When I lived in Florida the radio station I listened to, just up the road, was a top forty station - WAPE The Big Ape - and every week they ran a contest for the number one song and for weeks and weeks it was between Elvis and Ricky Nelson with the occasional third person thrown in. It was impressive, the string of hits these two guys put together in 1958.

Here's another novelty - Transufsion. How many allusions to blood can you count?

Finally, another classic that's been covered many times - Hot Rod Lincoln.

One could throw together an entire album of Hot Rod songs from this period.

I just can't help myself - Beep Beep. Give it a chance to get going.

Then there are the Motorcycle songs - Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots. Back in the day popular music was much broader category than it later became.

>39 geneg: I love that first Elvis song! His voice sounds like it has some blood in it, not that breathy yarl we know so well. Why oh why have we had "Blue Suede Shoes" crammed down our throats for fifty (!) years?

The other standout here for me is the motorcycle song. Motorcycles are cooler than cars, and motorcycle music is cooler than car music ("Transfusion" is ... well, it's very fifties). Everything makes sense. So was it like a whole movement? Bike gangs and hot rod gangs like teds and mods?

Here's more from me.

26. The Crystals - He's a Rebel (1962)

Kind of a pale imitation of "Leader of the PAck" in some ways, I suppose, but dude, that piano lick.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu3bKBIEypE

In a complicated story I'm not sure I fully understand, this song was credited to the Crystals but actually sung by the Blossoms--the clip is the Crystals lipsynching with it. Weird.

27. Ray Charles - I Can't Stop Loving You (1962)

Just in a class of its own somehow. Did anyone read the end of Beautiful Losers, with the purple sky? If not, I won't ruin it, but Ray Charles figures prominently and it is epic. I got all excited just now when I saw there was also a version feat. the Count Basie Orchestra, but it turns out it's kind of a travesty. This version is my favourite for reasons totally outside of its inclusion in the crashy smashy finale of the film version of Osamu Tezuka's amazing Metropolis (as featured in the clip), but it certainly doesn't hurt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI0ewvz27lI

28. Jerry Butler - Make It Easy on Yourself (1962)

Not opposed to yarls in general--just (sometimes) Elvis's. Alongside Ben E. King (and, later, Eddie Vedder), there's this piece of tragic perfection, which I nominate as the song of the year. I like Scott Walker a lot, but Butler's version of "Make It Easy on Yourself" seems more sincere somehow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD-EwhKrMFw

Here's another Jerry Butler song. This one is less heavily produced and brings out the glories of his voice - He Will Break Your Heart.

This is my favorite in this style of R&B - Cry to Me by Solomon Burke.

Here's one that's not too well known that may just blow your socks off, or not - Smoky Places yousonofabitchyousonofabitchyousonofabitchyousonofabitch. I had the copy on the Tuff label by The Corsairs and Jay "Bird" Uzzell. I coulda been one of those dudes dancing.

I know timewise I'm all over the place, but I'm just really digging riffing on what you throw out there. I'll let you go with this one - Cry Baby. This was another school bus rocker.

There was a fifty thousand watt clear channel radio station in Nashville, WLAC, that played this stuff on Friday and Saturday nights from 10 pm to 12pm. The first hour was sponsored by Randy's Records and the second hour by Ernie's Record Shop, both in Nashville, along with Queen Bergamot Hair Straightener and other items for the in crowd. It was the only way an Eastern North Carolina boy was going to hear this music. I'll bet Janis Joplin listened to WLAC, and heard these songs the same time I was listening to them.

I've been busy at work and home, but following this thread and others when I get a chance. Really enjoying everything you guys are putting up. And gene, what kind of grump wouldn't like the banter of the Beatles?

Wonderful thread MeditationesMartini, I've just tuned in and haven't got past 'Apache'! Haven't stopped grinning. I was there when it originally hit the charts.

>42 geneg: oooh, I like all of those. But I like Solomon Burke the best, and I am making room for him on my list. Suck it, Elvis!

This is exactly how I was hoping this would go! Thanks for helping me improve.

You know who else can suck it? Kylie Minogue. Here's 29. Little Eva - The Loco Motion (1962). Listen to those saxes at the start!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNNW0SPkChI

And rounding off 1962, 30. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles - You Really Got a Hold on Me. Another one covered by the Beatles, and another one where the Better Than Jesus Band didn't do the best version (as opposed to, say, "A Taste of Honey").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2EsZpobWJs

>43 slickdpdx:, 44 awesome, thanks guys! I cajole and exhort you to post some videos too.

On to 1963 and some British invaders! But first:

31. The Beach Boys - Be True to Your School

Importantly, the version with the cheerleaders.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4dHkSAciJs

32. The Ronettes - Be My Baby

Most iconic drumbeat ever? Somebody once made a mixtape entirely of songs that started the same way as "Be My Baby", including at least two later entries on this list. Also, if you'll pardon my saying so, Ronnie Spector, despite being "African-American, Cherokee Indian, and Irish" according to Wikipedia, is exactly what I imagined when Richard Price used the phrase "cunty Italian". Wow. Anyone know what the second song is?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0upHlWfQ4

33. Lesley Gore - It's My Party

I liked this before I even liked girl groups.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsYJyVEUaC4

This is one of my favorite threads! Great picks! Still looking for one of my favorite girl groups, but I'm confident that you'll get to them.

It seems to me you've got a major hole in your fifties stuff (more than one but I'll let that go), but maybe you'll find something worthwhile in these.

Mona. Quicksilver Messenger Service covered this one in the late sixties and depending on my mood I listen to them both. The entire "Happy Trails" album was something of an homage to Bo.

Take a little walk with me Arlene and tell me Who Do You Love?

Bo Diddley This is a tweofer with Bo's version of a "I'm a Man". He's got a white boy band backing him on these two, and like Chu Berry he could walk into a hall by himself and within five minutes have a complete backup band out of the audience. These are tunes a lot of people learned to play on their way up. I don't however think that's the case here.

And, last, You Can't Judge a Book by Looking at the Cover.

Get some Bo Diddley.

>47 theaelizabet: Thanks, buddy! You just made me realize one girl group that was definitely missing from the list, but I've added them now! I hope it's them you were thinking of--and not Martha & the Vandellas.

The next song on the list is by yet a third girl group (and one that has appeared once already) ....

34. The Crystals - And then He Kissed Me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XG4-vTArSwE

>48 geneg: my fifties stuff is nothing but holes! There's no fifties stuff at all, because I started at 1960. It is my hope that by posting here you will help give me the knowledge to extend the list backward. (Bo Diddley will be on it--although every time I hear "Who Do You Love" I can't help but think of Sideshow Bob usurping Krusty the Klown's show on the The Simpsons: "Good evening, children. Whoooommm do you love?"). Another contender who woulda featured more prominently had I delved back into the '50s is the Man in Black:

35. Johnny Cash - Ring of Fire

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRlj5vjp3Ko

Those horns excuse me from having to include Herb Alpert's "Spanish Flea".

36. Peter Paul & Mary - Puff the Magic Dragon (1963)

Folkies! This song is, like, picking rosehips with my mummy in Beacon Hill Park. I swear some days we could see him frolic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wik2uc69WbU

37. Stan Getz, Joao Gilberto, and Antonio Carlos Jobim feat. Astrud Gilberto - The Girl from Ipanema (1963)

I don't know what it means that Stan Getz is way, way worse than probably a dozen other contemporary tenor players (off the very top of my head, there's Trane, of course, Sonny Rollins, Stanley Turrentine, Gato Barbieri, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Wayne Shorter, Zoot Sims, Yusef Lateef, Booker Ervin, Rahsaan Roland Kirk .... okay, this isn't off the top of my head anymore), and yet, AND YET, this song is better than 99% of the shit those other assholes did. Chalk it up to the Brazilians and their sextelligence?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TqLmDhOdEc

Martha and the Vandellas sang what is arguably the perfect rock n roll song. Good beat for dancing, good tune, great lyrics, a little spooky sound, horns the works. I expect when you get to sixty four it will be there. If not, I'll post it.

Here's one you should consider having (I think, but I'm not you) in your '63 collection If you don't already. Sally Go Round the Roses by the Jaynetts.

If you would like I will put together another ten or so '50's songs for your consideration. They would be representative of rock during the decade. A tall order to cut it down to just ten, but I'll try.

Waiting for Martha and the Vs, but patiently...

>52 geneg: "Sally Go Round the Roses" is amazing! So mysterious. Reminds me of the Mingus tune I posted, as well as "Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes by the Edison Lighthouse ... for some reason!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tr6H1a7YUac

I would like it--a lot--if you would keep posting fifties songs until your interest or posting finger gives out: part of the reason I'm doing this is to get some more exposure to the music of that era from people with deep mineral knowledge, so to speak (you'll notice that almost all the songs I've posted so far were hits at the time), and that will allow me to extend the list further back and also to improve the years I've got. Already added Solomon Burke, and I suspect the Jaynetts will rotate in when I get tired of this next entry ....

38. Billy J. Kramer & the Dakotas - Do You Want to Know a Secret? (1963)

A case where I suspect the Beatles' cover (inaccessible to me) is actually better than the original, but they're so similar it doesn't make a tonne of difference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0wm59g-Gtc

>52 geneg:, 53, I'm sorry, but everyone knows this is the perfect rock song:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJprEyXMrIk

And to counteract that egregious assault on your ears, something smooooooth:

39. Kyu Sakamoto - Ue o muite arukou ("The Sukiyaki Song") (1963)

I have a soft spot for this natsumero (="natsukashii merojii", ="nostalgic melodies") tune that's perhaps not completely supportable, but he's also standing in for some mid-20th century J-pop that I can't get on Grooveshark, from e.g. Saburo Kitajima ("Yosaku", one of the best karaoke songs in the world, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1UBfhIkcQA), The Peanuts ("Koi no Fuuga", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-wJxo4vqtg), and yakuza thug Kenichi Hagiwara ("Osaka de Umareta Onna", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3r9VbFfLNCU&feature=related).

By the way, if any of you have hot tips for getting one's cyberhands on foreign-language music that's not popular in the English-speaking world, let me know! That would be amazing. Anyway, Kyu-san douzo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtXQ31F1A-k

55> Martini, take a close look at the guy introducing the BTO song in your first link from the post. Is that not Keith Moon of The Who? Or are my eyes playing tricks on me?

We finish off 1963 with what to me is just such a forward-sounding song. This could have come out in 1994 or 2010, albeit it would have been from one of those twee Britpoppers like the La's or retro-garage groups like the Black Lips.

40. The Searchers - Needles and Pins (1963)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2RqRxjjlsI

AND TEN! We begin 1964 with another little piece of perfection:

41. The Supremes - Baby Love

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23UkIkwy5ZM

And another, very different, but not worse:

42. Gerry & the Pacemakers - Ferry Cross the Mersey

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loyRYFUYg9g

(cute video!)

I'll take you up on the fifties thing. I really, really don't care for The Supremes. Too overexposed. But I'm definitely in the minority on that. Ferry Cross the Mersey is such a wonderful song. The Guess Who and BTO are really great. Canadian Bands that never ran away from their roots.

My favorite Guess Who song - Runnin' Back to Saskatoon. But that's a few years in the future. This tune is home grown. This is a particularly good live performance.

>56 absurdeist: oh sweet lord, it is. I was wondering why he was so dapper and dandyish--so far from the mien of the normal TV announcer, so neutral and yet so desperate to please. Philip Jose Farmer had a Riverworld story where Keith Moon was in a supergroup with John Lennon, Brian Jones, and Sid Vicious on an island in the middle of the river called Graceland, where Elvis really was the King--or rather, Keith's artificial cloned body with the original Keith's brain patterns was; I never really followed that part of the Rverworld mythos. RIP, in any case.

That's an odd note on which to introduce what might just be the best song of the sixties, if that weren't such a ludicrous prize to even think about handing out. I love it for the way it's so political and yet so personal. I love it for that beginning, which evokes this whole different world for me, of Louis Armstrong and "Willow Weep for Me" and shacks and crawfish and hell, Huck Finn, the antebellum South, John Henry, the beginning of Saul Williams's "Twice the First Time" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKuUrprum3E&feature=related), and endless free-association outward toward a world I don't really understand. My sister and her friend are going to Georgia and South Carolina this winter and I'm staying home to work and I'm kinda jealous. Gene, now, that I think about it, that's your part of the world, right? If there's anything they should definitely see or do, I know they'd appreciate the hot tips!

Anyway, here's the song. It's great.

43. Sam Cooke - A Change is Gonna Come (1964)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQU4torUz-Q

>58 geneg: awesome, I'm looking forward to the deluge.

I used to get into trouble with Randy Bachman's daughter a few years back--she grew up on Saltspring Island and went to school in Brentwood, which is where my family's, like, ancestral seat is (it's a dentist's office now, but it stands as testament to the fact that we've been on the West Coast of Canada since 1860, which is longer than just about anyone--Hudson's Bay traders, Salish people, and Vancouver Island Marmots of course excepted), and we were both into drinking and dancing and looking pretty at the right time for much laughter and irrational exuberance to result. Good days; good memories; but I'm still saddened that I missed the day when Randy took everyone out for their morning meal (form morning coffee to elevensies, all the beforenoon excuses to eat are pretty big deals in Victoria), thus giving them the chance to thank him for takin' care of breakfast.

Anyway, that was a great song. I like the shout out to Medicine Hat.

I guess here is where I confess that Martha and the Vandellas will not be appearing--although it was a near thing, and I don't know if I'd defend my choice really. Things are gonna come and go off the list; maybe I'll give the overexposed Supremes a rest at some point for the Vs.

The best-ever girl-group song I made special room for, though, is perfect. The way it starts with the other girls, smelling out Betty's tragedy. The way "by the way, where'd you meet him" is crammed into the beat before the start of the song proper and it sends the urgency through the roof and the girls are transformed into her backing singers and everything is just ... perfect.

44. The Shangri-La's - Leader of the Pack (1964)

Also, this video! That's class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGQt6GY8nKA

Ugh, it's after 11 already, and the snow is definitively not shutting down public transit. Okay:

45. (Eric Burdon &) The Animals - House of the Rising Sun (1964)

Another canoeing song, although this one more around the campfire than in the boats. Not sure this os the best version out there but it's the one I grew up with. And that organ solo!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmdPQp6Jcdk

46. Manfred Mann - Do Wah Diddy (1964)

Oh Manfred Mann. British Invade me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-y-50RW5Ng

Arguably the perfect rock 'n roll song - Dancing in the Street - Martha and the Vandellas. The beat just drives right through this song like an insistent Mack Truck.

I love the Animals version of House of the Rising Sun. As a folk rock song it's just about perfect. Here's an Animals song that they played a lot on AFVN Radio (Armed Forces Vietnam Radio) when I was there - We Gotta Get Out of this Place.

Here's another take on Doo Wah Diddy - That's what I like about the South - Did I tell you about the place called Doo Wah Diddy, well it ain't no town and it ain't no city, it's awful small and awful pretty, well doo wah diddy. Phil Harris and his orchestra. This isn't rock but you might find it interesting. This is the Phil Harris who voiced Baloo the Bear in Disney's "Jungle Book" Cartoon, not the late lamented Captain of the Cornelia Marie. However here's another Phil Harris song that would be apropos to the Captain - Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette.

One more before I call it quits for tonight on this thread. This is the original version of a song that two years later would be massacred by a white boy band and turned into a number one hit - My Girl Sloopy - The Vibrations. This is from 1964.

>62 geneg: funny, all this time I thought you guys were talking about this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfJGZzf8kRw. They're both great, but "Heat Wave" is really great and probably belongs on the list, if only I could decide what to jettison. I think "Dancing in the Street" has been a bit sullied for me by this coke-fuelled car wreck (did I just post this somewhere else? Well, here it is again):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNFjQcO9fYg

Yeah, the Animals did a really good job on a lot of stuff. Here's another fave:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yGarEaWt5M

And! I'm glad to have the original source for this Captain Beefheart lyric:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XcdG_sXZjA

That Phil Harris song is good, but the cigarette one is excellent. Never been tempted to take up the noxious weed, but I've been missing it lately. Seems somehow symbolic of a lost world in which we cared about things other than our careers and the gym. I think I've spent too long at a rich kids' university; it's making me sour.

But! "My Girl Sloopy" makes me the opposite of sour, because I didn't think anyone could salvage that mess, but this version is actually awesome! Now if only someone could do the same for "Louie Louie".

Now, a couple more choons before bed:

47. The Temptations - My Girl

It feels so good that men could sing a song as gentle as this about a woman and have it be a hit. Like, what's the tenderest love lyric you can think of in a recent hit written by a man that isn't intentional schlock? I'm sure I could do better if I tried, but right now it's "my bitch a choosy lover / never fuck without a rubber", and don't get me wrong, that song rules and it'll be on here too, but it feels like we lost something somewhere kinda.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltRwmgYEUr8

48. Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence

This came out in 1964? I would have sworn it was a couple of years later. Oh well. They played this at the end of the Simpsons one time and changed the words to "Hello Grandpa my old friend", and I liked it, and then they played it when my grandma died and I was sold.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZGWQauQOAQ

Now, see, this music business works both ways. I never listened to Captain Beefheart, I had it in my mind that he was an early version of some singer-songwriter band (a genre I mostly detest). That cut of "Diddy Wah Diddy" was very nice, and the dude dancing was incredible.

I always thought "Heat Wave" just sounded like another girl group song, but there is something magical about Martha and the Vandellas version of "Dancing in the Street". It sounds much less like a girl group song and somehow more mature, both as music and as rock. As I said about the Supremes I wasn't all that into girl groups. Most of their songs were trite and/or maudlin. I know that's a broad brush, but you must remember, 1964 was the year of the Beatles and the beginning of the British Invasion, not to mention Dylan had been selling records for a couple of years by then. Keep in mind we were only about a year from this. My taste in music was moving away from theTin Pan Alley/Brill Building girl groups into different channels.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. Here are two songs, one that had been around a while (maybe a year) and had gotten to the top of the charts and the second one was brand spankin' new. The first time I heard the second song on the radio, the first one had just been played. You tell me what happened.

The first one. I had already declared this song to be the death of rock 'n' roll.

The second one. After I heard this, I knew that rock 'n' roll was here to stay.

Yeah, when I heard the release of "Hang on Sloopy" by the McCoys, I thought what an absolute tragic travesty to ruin such a great song. When I lived in North Carolina we used to do the Animal House thing and go to black clubs to hear the R&B and, what we called Beach Music, which was decidedly NOT the Beach Boys. Lots of great acts came through eastern North Carolina in small clubs and dives. We got to be regulars at a couple of places. But there were only three or four of us that really liked that music.

The history of "Sounds of Silence" is interesting. It was initially released as a mostly acoustic song, that's how I first heard it, around 1963 or early 1964 and didn't do too well, so a year or so later it was re-released with a folk-rock backing track. I prefer the acoustic version myself.

>65 geneg: yeah, I always thought Beefheart was this sort of sub-Zappa character, which is something that's not always my line--but it turns out he more or less rules. Super gritty psych. Here's a track from 1968:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCSPf5Viwd0&feature=related

Yeah, it's fascinating, right? How things seem one way at the time and totally different in retrospect. A lot of people lately have been speculating on the death of rap--I wonder, and I wonder what will happen next. I kind of like that Vinton song, but I suspect that if I were growing up in the 1960s I'd be totally agin it--rock just seems like it must self-evidently have opened up these ... vistas, even from the post hoc spot where those avenues have been explored exhaustively and we've heard it all before. I hear about you visiting those r 'n' b clubs in North Carolina, and I think man, it would be amazing to go back to a time when this music was great and dangerous instead of great and, like, dusty. I love Richard Price's novel The Wanderers for that--like DION inspired youth gangs!

So what WAS "beach music"?

Closing in on 50, I have one very forward-looking number:

49. The Kinks - You Really Got Me (1964)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln3OVpOmIgI

And one song that is definitely better than "Unchained Melody":

50. The Righteous Brothers - You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling (1964)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhs3Rj71gpo

And what the hell, on to 1965! Here's a classy number; my sister's and my favourite karaoke duet:

51. Petula Clark - Downtown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhs3Rj71gpo

When I say "beach music" I'm talking about a certain southern style of r n b. Songs like that party sounding version of "My Girl Sloopy" by the Vibrations, or "Smoky Places" from a few posts up or Stay by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. Or Nuts by Doug Clark and the Hot Nuts - a novelty, but as you can see from the video, it was called Beach Music. A lot of it was by bands that never really made any records, but played all up and down the mid-Atlantic coast. Beach Party music. In the nineties it was referred to as "Shag Music", a term I never heard back in the day.

Here's a wikipedia article that can tell the story better than I can. As you can see, a lot of the popular "beach music" became standard rock and r n b fare.

And yes, one has a different perspective watching this music becoming than one gets looking back through the lens of time. It was always new, fresh and exciting and the ballsier the better. If you could do the dirty bop to it, or a long, slow grind with your honey, then it was for me, otherwise, shut up and get out the way. That's why I despised the Vinton song. It seemed like a sellout to what had come before. Although, looking back through that same tunnel of time, I have come to appreciate much of the pre-r n r fifties stuff, just as I have learned to appreciate the country music of the day, that I felt sooooo superior to at the time. But I have never been able to forgive the Vinton's and the Vee's and the others of that ilk.

I really liked Pet Clark. Her music was bright and perky with energy. Here's another of hers I liked a lot - Sign of the Times. You know, when you look at that video, those styles, the choreography, the graphics, all of it was just as goofy then as it looks now. We were hip and cool, not plastic idiots. It was absolutely amazing how seriously the media misjudged our culture. This was pop music for old people (not the song, necessarily, but the show behind the song). The establishment was completely puzzled by Bob Dylan. He simply refused to play along with the storyline they had constructed around him. It was great! Our parents were totally befuddled by us, every teenager and young twenty something's dream.

This was how we viewed the outside world who were scratching their heads looking in on us - Ballad of a Thin Man. Finding Dylan on YouTube is a challenge. This isn't what I would play, but there it is. Anyway, Bob spoke for us in this song much the same way Sarah Palin speaks for the Tea Party. If was all a great big FU. Of course, as with all good things it came to an end in a haze of alcohol, drugs, crackups and cynicism, but what a ride, musically speaking.

Martin, I was researching fifties for my promised list when I hit real paydirt. It's a sight that lists (and provides tracks and lyrics) for the top 100 hits for each year from 1950 - 1959. It probably goes beyond these years both ways, but I was only interested in the fifties. I agree with 98% of them, but there are a few not on the lists that I would have liked to see there. Anyway the site is http://www.nutsie.com/top100sradio/1950%20Top%20100%20Songs/2407475 By changing the year you can scan through here.

It's very interesting and I will create a top ten by year and then let you decide if any of them are worthy of your playlist. But I really recommend you go to these pages and listen. In 1950 there was not a single song I would consider Rock n. Roll, by 1959 99% of it is rock n roll. I would recommend the Hank Williams tracks. Oh, hell, I'd recommend you take a month and listen to them all. Here is the birth and early genesis of rock n roll.

Gene,

That's an incredible finding of lists. I'm heading over to the metal thread right now to link the top 100 metal songs of all time. Thank you!

>68 geneg: oh, I freakin' love that song "Stay"! That's really cool, a whole culture that I didn't even know existed. I like the idea of "the beach" being this crazy meeting place with bands and bars and fights and laughs--out here we go to the lake, because the ocean is too cold to really swim in most of the year, an there's maybe a certain amount of similarity but there's not the critical mass of people and venues and whatnot to create a "strip"--and, I mean, this is just the way I'm imagining it--a strip of awesome times the whole way down the coast. On the "reinterpreting the past" note, it's interesting how a lot of the beach music guys on the wikipedia page get reinterpreted or categorized in this amorphous rock or rnb basket--like, to me it seems like anyone who likes the Paul McCartney Beatles would have to love the Monkees, but to my dad "Yesterday" and "Daydream Believer" are separated by this impenetrable wall of, like, cultural authenticity or something--one is art and one bubblegum.

I know what you mean about going back and learning to appreciate stuff you hated at the time too. I had a whole year of learning about rap, because in high school it was the music of the enemy, the kids we'd fight with, and so I never got deep into it. Currently learning to appreciate the '50s, which get so ill-served by media and popular history--you'd think it was all "Rock Around the Clock", all the time.

These next songs are both stone-cold all-time top top top masterpieces. The first one, I want playing at my wake:

52. The Byrds - Turn Turn Turn

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ga_M5Zdn4

And the second one is just amazing. A project for a rainy day is a playlist of pop songs with harpsichord, and it will begin right here.

53. The Yardbirds - For Your Love

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2LSSgQMc2E

>69 geneg: I'm glad to hear that plastic-idiot stuff was just failed co-optation or mockery or whatever--it makes the world make a lot more sense. It also reminds me of this, which you've probably seen but should if you haven't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmSv2WFDrs

And finally, some more jazz! (And not Lawrence Welk jazz.) I bet there'd be even more if I stopped and thought about it for a while, but most of my favourite jazz is 1950s. This song, though, is so startling, terrifying, utterly unlike almost anything else I've ever heard, actually. It's incredible.

54. Nina Simone - Sinnerman

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn5tiuZU4JI

>70 geneg: ohhhh shit that's amazing. I'm gonna be fiftiesing it up all Christmas--hopefully with a sweet extended playlist at the end of it. Thanks, and I look forward to your recommendations.

55. The Who - The Kids are All Right

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afam2nIae4o

This is somebody young but wise who knows where they're at and how to keep themselves nourished. This is somebody who's got a little relationship stress and doesn't know what the future holds, but who can laugh it off and, in a broader sense, who's gonna have some fun and do some good in the world. Sincere; the self-examined life.

>71 absurdeist: Metal list! Going to check that out immediately.

56. The Supremes (sorry, Gene:) Stop! In the Name of Love

God, for that first line alone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDPjYZxi0n8

And thanks for posting this next link, Gene. I was having trouble finding it on my own.

57. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone

Not going to blurb this one--Greil Marcus took a whole book to do it, and an awful book to boot. But damn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD-i-yv-Mz8&feature=related

58. James Brown - It's a Man's World (1965)

This is a bit of cheatery, and something that I should really fix--there was a 1965 recording of this song, and then Brown rerecorded it in a way more produced version a few years later--the familiar "It's a Man's Man's Man's Man's World", which i've linked, and its amazing strings. It was just easier to fit it in in 1965 than 1968 or whatever, and I really wanted to find a home for those amazing strings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwuO2dfqrF4

59. The Kinks - Tired of Waiting for You

The Kinks, man. They just seem like a bunch of goofy douches who made history because of righttimeatrightplaceism and crazy, crazy talent. They're the Mary Sues, the ones you(=one, =me) feel like you'd be if you woke up sixties rockstar famous tomorrow in bed with Marianne Faithfull. They maintained a certain sweetness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz64hWng2vM

I'm mightily enjoying this list. Any list with Nina Simone, James Brown, Petula Clark and The Who has to be good.

>77 A_musing: thank you, sir! I encourage counter- and alongsideposting.

60. Otis Redding - You Don't Miss Your Water

Mope.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dHaMV_eXko

And then, suddenly, unbelievably, it's 1966!

61. Simon & Garfunkel - The 59th Street Bridge

Kickin' down the tarmac in San Diego one indelible spring day in 1998, singin' this one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KZi-aV0VTk

62. The Hollies - Bus Stop

One of many Mod Night hits to come.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=It75wQ0JypA

http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/music/dylan_handwritten_lyrics_to_sell_090...

Handwritten lyrics from a complete unknown to be auctioned.

63. Cannonball Adderley Quintet - Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (1966)

This was the song my combo used to close our shows with, back when I played jazz. I would get all precious and do the little speech that Cannon used to introduce the song with ("sometimes ... sometimes we're not prepared for adversity") etc. It's by Joe Zawinul, the emaciated Austrian who played keyboards in one of the funkiest jazz groups of all time, and later went on to found Weather Report. This song is a lot of fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRrFWp4DUho

64. The Byrds - Eight Miles High (1966)

How come nobody talks about how the Byrds basically invented the Velvet Underground, right here? Listen to that guitarrrrbbbbbbbbbbdeiaebdlieaildibiedbiadilaelbdabiealiebdlaebdiadbl

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCT9naHt2oo

Ima keep posting till the bitter end regardless, but you guys should throw down too! What's your favourite song from the sixties?

I am very fond of the Byrds' version of Dylan's My Back Pages.

I am quite the folkie but I wish I was around when Dylan went electric and pissed everyone off.

How about some James Brown -Try Me

I normally don't like medley's but here's one anyway. Papa's Got a Brand New Bag/I Feel Good

And finally, Please, Please, Please. The hardest working man in show business.

Oh, I almost forgot. Here's one that features his band, The Famous Flames, my favorite version of this song, ever - Night Train.

Anna, I was and it was GREAT! I was a half assed folkie and a full time rocker, so I loved it.

Once again, there's nothing on YouTube directly from Freewheelin', but his version of Corinne, Corinna on this album featured a full backing band: drums, electric guitar, and bass. I'm not sure why people got so upset when he went fully electric. It had the same bluesy feel that It's All Over Now, Baby Blue from Bringing It All Back Home has.

Is that Please, Please, Please from the T.A.M.I. Show? I think it is. Have you seen it geneg? Amazing. He made it hard for the Stones to take the stage.

I think it is. I've seen just parts of it. Of course back then who were the Rolling Stones? What were they going to sing?
Some white boy version of what the other acts did all the time?

79> for 200 - 300K!!! Not bad for a piece of yellowed notebook paper with some iconic scribblings.

>86 geneg: True. Of course most of that crowd didn't know James Brown and by the time the Stones got on stage they looked very white, indeed. This is Please, Please, Please (yes, from the T.A.M.I. show) Night Train starts about 6:22 and at 6:10 or so there's a great take of the crowd.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54y_XDKNxPg&feature=related

84: Freewheelin' is my favorite (I said I was a folkie...) Corrina Corrina is such a great song!
...My favorite version of "It's all over now, baby Blue" is by the Seldom Scene. I adore bluegrass- my dad is a banjo player (a darned good one too!) and I grew up listening to the Scruggses, the Scene, Jim & Jesse, Bill Monroe, etc. (I think I have had this convo on this list before.)

Me and Bobby McGee.

I don't think that song has left my brain since the 60s.

My favorite 60s album: Conspicuous only in its Absence by The Great Society

>82 anna_in_pdx: yeah, "My Back Pages" (Byrds version) aaaalmost made the list, but not quite. I just realized I haven't seen that recent Dylan movie yet. Downloading now! Excited.

65. The Four Tops - Reach Out (I'll be There) (1966)

There is NOTHING BETTER than when soul guys get a little bit psychedelic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtrNZGbwrng

66. The Barbarians - Moulty

This is the most inspirational song in the world. It's about their drummer, Victor "Moulty" Moulton, who lost his hand and got real low but then triumphed and had a great life being the drummer in the Barbarians! And now all he needs is a real girl, one who really loves him. I hope he finds her. This was my sister's favourite inspirational song, and there was a whole bunch of us who used to hang out at Mod Night in Victoria and get all dressed up and dance, and the music was mostly a mix of rockers and fast soul hitz and things like "I Can't Help Myself", and every week we requested "Moulty" and the DJ was all "nobody will dance to 'Moulty'" because it's all slow or whatever, and so we mounted a grassroots campaign and told everybody about Moulty's inspirational story and got them to deluge him with requests, and he played it on the night's first anniversary, last song of the night, and the whole bar was up and dancing ridiculously, because it's not exactly dance tempo, and on the tables and cheering and it was just a really really good moment. Hooray!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25x3aIWs76E

>83 geneg: you know, I have no idea why "Night Train" isn't on here already. Fixed! And yeah, "Please Please Please" is incredible. Definitely joining the team when I get back to 1958.

67. The Creation - Making Time (1966)

I will admit to coming to this through Rushmore, but who cares? We all gotta start somewhere, and this piece of mod awesome is ... mod awesome.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NanaVb77plI

(another one of theirs I'm big on is "Painter Man":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmxMqV00cUE&feature=related)

68. the Beach Boys - God Only Knows (1966)
>90 A_musing: that album is SO GREAT!! That and Love's Alone Again Or, and the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, and a million others in kind of the same vein. I always liked the Great Society more than Jefferson Airplane (although, uh, stay tuned and be ready to laugh). I think I'm gonna hit the road with my "Nuggets" compilation and never stop.

(also, whoa, what, Grace Slick was gorgeous! http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=electric+prunes&aq=f)

Wow, right? I kind of hate it for keeping "Sloop John B" off the list, but I kind of love it for all the things that it are. Indelibly associated with my first real breakup, and even though we were callow teens she and I still talk ten years later and it makes me happy and takes me right back and the song plays somewhere offscreen. I love how it's all pretty and sad and then that really nasal dude comes in all "bom-ba bom-ba bom-ba bommmm" like it's "Barbara Ann" or something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89HXci7rxdc&feature=fvst

68. The Electric Prunes - I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night

Another one in the same vein (not as the beach boys, as those other dudes). I love the way it moves.

oh, oops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMnM0oCKL6k

70. The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love(oops, Electric Prunes shoulda been 69)

This is, like, going to the lake music, only there's girls with you and they don't want to listen to Rage Against the Machine and secretly you're relieved.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw5RkzbHb-w

SUMMER OF LOVE SUMMER OF LOVE

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuK9hBGGyDg)

71. The Monkees - Daydream Believer (1967)

Just makes me happy inside.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uohP4gk0wU

72. The Turtles - Happy Together (1967)

So sweet. Washes the bad away like tears in rain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1rArjZ_z6c

73. Lulu - To Sir with Love

Makes you miss the loves of the past and wonder what the future holds. Also, Sidney Poitier!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sczEBtOnD3k

Lulu and David Bowie also do a really great version of Bowie's "Dodo":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CB061UppXc

74. The Small Faces - Itchycoo Park

Poor Stevie. The Kinks own my heart most days, but when I just want to go up the wooden hills to Bedfordshire, it's the Faces all the way. Rod Steward can eat it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJzcF0v1eOE

My favorite version of Sloop John B. But then at one time I WAS a pretty reliable folky.

I know a lot of people have come to this song through Johnny Cash, but I know it from these guys - Delia's Gone. The quiet picking here is so nice.

Anna, I love bluegrass and the Seldom Scene are one of its great practitioners, but for me no one does Dylan like Dylan.

Well, for whatever reason I can't edit the above msg, so I'll do this here.

Another Folk song that I greatly like is The Banana Boat Song by the Tarriers. The guitarist for the group was a fellow named Alan Arkin, last seen as the junkie grandfather in "Little Miss Sunshine". By the way this is the original of this song. It came out in 1955, I believe and was covered a year or two later by, among others, Harry Belafonte as "Day-o" (or some such spelling). I much, much prefer this one. A little less histrionic.

Beginning with the mid-sixties rock split into various streams. The Airplane released "Takes Off" in 1965. Here's a listen to their pre Surrealistic Pillow psychedelic sound. I particularly like this one Come up the Years. BTW, that female voice is Signe Anderson, not Grace Slick.There were many British Invasion bands coming on, includiing the Stones. Here's a story song about the New York folk scene and how it morphed into the jangly rock scene. This is from 1967, but tells a neat story Creeque Alley. I think this is actually my favorite Mamma's and Pappa's.

The point is there's a whole new direction coming that isn't much explored here, so far.

>97 geneg: yeah, I like that version best too. Glad I'm extending this list back into the fifties.

Speaking of bananas, any recommendations for Harry Belafonte? My mum was in love with him when she was young, and I like his politics, so I'm well disposed toward him, but all I got is that Day-o song, which is just too silly and colonial for words.

75. Traffic - Dear Mr. Fantasy

Speaking of my mum, this band is a shared delight between us. I'm realizing how much of this list is deeply family-based.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vReD2zryQmA

The Who - I Can See for Miles

Nuclear. Attack. Percussion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hje28F-IhLo

77. Nico - These Days

I was in love with a girl I worked with at the Moka House in 2002 and she made me a nametag that said "The Thin White Duke" and herself a nametag that said
"I Suck On That Emotion" and it never went anywhere which was the great tragedy of my 22nd year but she loved Nico and had her same hair and always played this song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_z_UEuEMAo

78. Smokey Robinson & the Miracles - The Tears of a Clown

SIMPLY THE BEST

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2kxlZDOHeQ

I like this Belafonte song -Jamaica Farewell. Much less histrionic than Day-o and it still has that Caribbean flavor.

>100 geneg: that's exactly the sort of thing I meant! Thank you.

79. The Velvet Underground - Sunday Morning

I love when Lou Reed gets cuddly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cWzxJvgWc8

99> it is simply the best, but my intro to the song (believe it or not, as Jack Palance once said) was from The English Beat's version of the song off their debut album, circa 1980:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjnYRD2vm8E&feature=related

I don't know who you've left out from '67, but Velvet Underground taking up the rear?????

Don't we kind of need Lou's velvety tones as an antitode to all those happy together daydreaming unhurried love miles of clown tears?!?

>103 A_musing: you're right. That should have been 79. The Dubliners - The Rising of the Moon, and vice versa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2M4usgh8Ss

And: 81. Simon & Garfunkel - America (1968)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAhyiGp-huk

>102 absurdeist: heh, like how my introduction to Queen was via Vanilla Ice.

82. Scott Walker - Plastic Palace People (1968)

I love Scott Walker so much. I want him to be my uncle. This song is about a boy with a balloon named Billy Balloon who gets away and the boy wants him back but Billy Balloon is away. Then the camera pans out and it's about their prosperous suburban milieu. The music is snowy and soft and makes me think of mid-20th century American movies about Christmas in New York.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayrS74ktTyE

83. Otis Redding - Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay

"Plastic Palace People"'s summer counterpart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nA18g_PwG0

84. The Move - Blackberry Way(1968)

"Strawberry fields / nothing is real" is a beautiful dream, but "blackberry way / pouring down with rain / it's a terrible day" is every-day music, especially on the West Coast. Also, FUCKING CHECK OUT ROY WOOD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iirNwgdZbjM

85. Os Mutantes - Baby(1968)

I had a hard breakup last/this year, and when I was first putting together this list (it was partly because) I was in a dark place, and there were a lot of seriously sad songs on it that have since migrated out, as well as a lot of songs that I never put on because they were hard to hear. This was one of the latter, but I've added it since. It's a measure of things getting better. It still brings a tear to my eye, but ... in what feels like a healthier, happier way. They were here in Vancouver recently, which is a HUGE DEAL! (if you don't know about them, here is Wikipedia on the amazing history of the Tropicalismo movement of which they were a part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropicalismo) But I stayed away, let Heidi go instead; I guess you could call it a custody thing, but I thought of it more as a loving act.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLq-ixiy3WE

86. Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne (1968)

But don't cry any tears for me: even more important than Os M. is a certain Mr. Leonard Cohen, who comprises 1/3 of the pop triptych in my heart and is the greatest genius Canada has ever produced. And I saw him the night before last! And it was the second time! Truly blessed. This was his last song, and it was similar but even more wonderful to the version linked:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CV-NGaK2xcU

87. The Foundations - Build Me Up Buttercup (1968)

And now for something completely different! This video is adorable and totally in the spirit of song (the spirit of FUN):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eDj_Aeb_K4&feature=related

88. The Rolling Stones - Sympathy for the Devil (1968)

Always goes with The Master and Margarita for me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Je8MXiwmNIk

89. Tommy James & the Shondells - Crimson and Clover (1968)

There's not another song that makes me feel quite like this one does. Like everyone, but everyone, is gonna fall in love and roll down hills and then grow old together. I always thought that was the crimson and clover over and over part--she's rolling down the hill and the grass is green and her hair is deep deep red. There's a picnic basket at the bottom. They will cook romantic dinners for each other on their anniversaries.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ-P8Fgfhvk

90. The Kinks - Village Green Preservation Society (1968)

Gives conservatism a good name.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL9tyzE83nc

91. King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man (1969)

As recently revived by Kanye West. As terrifying as ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7h4qT6OrdQ

Man, this place got sleepy! Sleepy like I am after staying up all night to work on formatting this incredibly punctilious and faithless woman's dissertation. She has called me literally six times in the past 24 hours to check on how it's going and remind me about her deadline. Meanwhile, Word for Mac 2011 has crashed seven times. How do they get away with putting garbage like that out in the world?

92. Blind Faith - Can't Find My Way Home (1969)

LOVE STEVIE WINWOOD.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN1J5sMv28Q

93. The Hollies - (He Ain't Heavy) He's My Brother (1969)

I'm gonna sing this one day as I carry someone home, and it's gonna be epic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1KtScrqtbc

I love "Beggar's Banquet" but not for the usual suspects. I think my favorite is Factory Girl followed closely by Salt of the Earth.

My favorite Blind Faith is Sea of Joy.

One of the interminable elections of best/worst songs of all time had "Build Me up Buttercup" as the worst song ever. I tend to agree, but you know, taste is a magical thing and everyone's is different. The year I spent in Vietnam left me with an odd list of favorites (for me) for that year. I still can't hear Young Girl by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap without wanting to sing along. If you have garnered anything about my taste you should know that normally I would absolutely revile this song, but after hearing it over and over and over ad nauseum for the better part of a year it rearranged my DNA, at least as far as this song goes. So taste can be a pfunny thing.

Love the Kinks, they are my favorite of the big three, like the Stones, they really aren't the same into the seventies and beyond.

Also love the Hollies. You had Bus Stop earlier, which is an unsurpassable pop item (by Graham Gouldman, incidentally). He Ain't Heavy is not in the list of my fav Hollies tunes, though I know it was big.

>111 geneg: I never knew that was Blind Faith! Thank you.

And yeah, "Young Girl" is terrible. But I relate; I've been known to bust out the Wilson Phillips.

Anyway:

94. Creedence Clearwater Revival - Fortunate Son (1969)

I had all these favourite Creedence songs from childhood, when my shirtless cousins would play them on the guitar up at my grandma's place, but it wasn't till John Kerry's presidential campaign (ha!) that I got the glory of "Fortunate Son." So punk.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBfjU3_XOaA

95. The Jackson 5 - I Want You Back (1969)

Is there a more universally agreed-upon song?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfJu_Bom2sA

96. Leonard Cohen - Story of Isaac (1969)

Brrrrr. This makes me think of Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death, and of my father.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIQOmbIMYls

97. David Bowie - Space Oddity (1969)

I won this album, or more accurately a gift certificate that allowed me to buy it, at a swing-dancing competition when I was 18. (I was in the band, and it was a random draw--don't much swing dance m'self.) It sent me off on a powerfully freaky year.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYMCLz5PQVw

>the big three are the beatles, the stones and the kinks? I wouldn't argue myself--love the kinks--but I had no idea the popular imagination put them in such rarefied celebrity company. I'd have guessed the Who if pressed. Although, let's face it, in terms of influence it's all topsy-turvy, and weirdly you'd have to convince me that the beatles would even get a look in. How many rockin' psych albums or strummy harmoneering ahs there been over the past forty years, versus how many peacocking hard rock tunes after the stones, or metal after zeppelin and sabbath, or all the things that came out of Reed and Cale's bag of tricks:

98. the Velvet Underground - Pale Blue Eyes (1969)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnjaevCMj_o

99. Sly & the Family Stone - Everyday People (1989)

Currently listed as my "religious views" on facebook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgVOR28iG_o

100. The Kinks - Victoria

Victoria, British Columbia, is my home, and there is an amazing version of this song floating around by local heroes Nomeansno where the words are all changes to refer to the "city of the newly wed and nearly dead" (as it's known) and all the drunks at the Forge (which hasn't existed in 20 years) and etc. But I'm posting the original.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VzsQoR806c

101. David Bowie - All the Madmen (1970) Not the darkest song I know, but maybe the one most content in its darkness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uT3NZTYpPA

Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song (1970)

That wail.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlNhD0oS5pk

Ah, that wailllllllll indeed! Now you're getting into automusicographical territory I know and love well ...

My acoustic favorite off the album that first featured "Immigrant Song," Zeppelin's third (III) album,

Tangerine.

>117 absurdeist:, yeah, that track is so solid. I love how it starts out acoustic and then that guitar solo comes in--it must have sounded so futuristic in 1970; it reminds me of something off Ziggy Stardust--could even be put up against a NWOBHM backing trak and come out sounding like roses. Of course, everything Zeppelin ever did is basically fantastic, except "D'yer Maker".

Enrique / everybody, question: when I was in high school we used to shout "Zeppelin rules!" before/while doing anything particularly stupid and/or awesome (bungee jumping, hood surfing, slamming a bottle of vodka before the cops took it away). I think we got it from The Simpsons. My dad, whose powers of scorn are endless, would make fun of us because back in the seventies they were always "Led Zep" and nobody-but-nobody would ever call them "Zeppelin". Is this true, or just a crazy old man idea he has?

Here's more songz:

The Velvet Undeground - Who Loves the Sun (1970)

I guess this is him moping inside because who loves the sun when your baby left you, but I always think of it as walking home at dawn feeling ever so crapulent, and the sun is coming up, and you're like "nobody loves you, cheery harbinger of the day. Hiss!"

BlackSabbath - Black Sabbath (1970)

Best use of the tritone--the interval that divides the octavein twain, and is known for its creeeeeepy vibe--in metal. And that's saying something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akt3awj_Ah8

105. Jackson 5 - I'll be There (1970)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6bARIaMhCM

106. Miles Davis - Pharaoh's Dance (1970)

(for some reason I couldn't find all of it)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BPjO0MKU6U

118:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApxnAr6pRt0

>120 anna_in_pdx: That was intense! I just showed it to everybody, to universal acclaim.

107. The Kinks - Apeman

I was born in the Year of the Monkey, and related much to this since I was a young sprout. Also, great video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlM52fUrNz4

108. The Grateful Dead - Friend of the Devil

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJhJNho9gM4&feature=related

And you know, I love the Dead now, but it was a process, whereas with the Kinks it was instant ecstatic recognition. I guess something about skinny jeans and big fur coats just makes more sense to me than leather and Teamsters.

Hey, I am year of the Monkey too! Wow, that means you are 12 years younger than me. Sigh. I am over the hill...

But, Anna! Life begins at 40. Martin... you have a decade to prepare to live. ;-)

I am also a Monkey year person, and Anna I believe I am 24 years older than you, old but not over the hill.

Robert

118 - Martin, it was always Led Zep when I was at school in New Zealand in the late 70s.

'Led Zep for govt' was the common graffito on desks at my secondary school.

>122 anna_in_pdx:, 124 we are the best kind of people from the young apelets with their gambols, to the aged Monkey King with crafty wisdom in his opaque gimlet eyes.

>123 highdesertlady: how will I prepare!?!?! by doing as little premature living as possible?

>125 zenomax: aha, thanks. so my dad was right. Alos, good to see you here, Zeno. I believe we are coming up to some years of music about which you will have much to say. (Not necessarily immediately, but soon.)

109. Simon & Garfunkel - The Boxer (1970)

1999, living on my own for the first time, no food but just enough whiskey, 130 pounds and not dressed for the weather, this song was there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdKjEHfHINQ

110. Cat Stevens - Wild World (1970)

Like "The Boxer", takes the gentleness in the eye of chaos as its starting point. Soothes the savage beast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHXpnZi9Hzs

111. Joni Mitchell - All I Want (1971)

My go-to song when I'm on a lonely road and missing home. Oh Canada ....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoWx8HDdyZ8

112. Marvin Gaye - Mercy Mercy Me (1971)

post-Capture the Flag rooftop dawns, just me watching the city wakeup and feeling love.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9BA6fFGMjI

113. David Bowie - Life on Mars (1971)

And after you hear this song for the first time, everything's just a little bit less real, forever. the ultimate break in the fourth wall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v--IqqusnNQ

114. Led Zep - Black Dog (1971)

And so "Immigrant Song" is fine, but here's my actual favourite Zeppelin song/maybe guitar riff of all time. It's like crazy math!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2M6yV6mueg

126: Gee, we should start a band! Maybe we could use a goofy spelling to be more "with it"...

:)

My favorite Cat Stevens song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMl94L-6NUg&feature=fvw

My favorite Led Zep song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrVDViSlsSM

My favorite S&G song: Same as you!

>127 anna_in_pdx: tha Monquies are gonna take the charts by storm! As long as I can be Dayvve J'onnz.

Thanks for those. The Zeppelin song especially never really jumped out at me before like it did this time. (Magic of Youtube?) The guitar riff sounds like something, but it's just not coming to me, so here's aonther favourite of mine from Cat:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cat+stevens+moonshadow&aq=1

And here's the next two on the list:

115. Elton John - Tiny Dancer (1971)

This is a sweet clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Qn3tel9FWU

116. Tin Tin - Toast and Marmalade for Tea (1971)

When my sister and I and her new baby moved in together in this beautiful place down by the beach in 2007 (the very bottom end of stormy old Vancouver Island--just the Strait of Juan de Fuca separating us and Washington State, and sometimes I would get attached to American cell phone signals and end up with horrifying spurious $500-plus roaming charges), our friend made us a mix tape called "McCarvillville", after our last name and thus the name of our home, and we listened to it a billion times, and this was the last song and usually came with tea and rain.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1SenDxZAbA

I think Tiny Dancer is my favorite Elton John Song, also. Depending on my mood I drift between it and Levon.

Oh, Oh!!! If you be Davey Jones, I will love you forever! I think I still have two of their LPs in a box somewhere. My fav Saturday morning shows were The Monkees and the Jackson 5. Oh and lest we forget Bobby Sherman. *sigh*

Speaking of the Monkees and made for TeeVee bands, here's one from my favorite band from which a TeeVee band was cloned. I like the spring in the beat of this. Even if it is a little bubblegummy for my taste, sometimes these things just inexplicably happen.

Indian Lake.

>130 highdesertlady: yeah, you guys were lucky with your boy bands--although we did have this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW3PFC86UNI

and this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwrL9MV6jSk

and if you stretch a point, seeing as I was seventen by this time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6XE1XRiLeY

My favourite Elton song is coming up shortly, but here is one that barely missed making the list:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6KYAVn8ons

and here are more songs from the actual list:

117. Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat (1971)

The most amazing with its shifting subjectivity and its bone sadness. Me and my best friend used to sing this together, and the we fell in love with the same girl. If you ever read Cohen's Beautiful Losers, and you should, do it with this song in mind:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aRKZFR5imM

118. Hawkwind - Master of the Universe (1971)

Hawkwind's only appearance on the lsit. But not Lemmy Kilminster's! I'M SO EXCITED I COULD SPIT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvEtqGDFPA0

LOL... Love Will Smith! Milli Vanilli, not so much. Backstreet Boys, tolerable. Although, I do like Donnie Walberg as an actor. He's doing well, imho, on Bluebloods and his short stint on Rizzoli and Iles last summer.

>133 highdesertlady: Donnie! Every girl in my class loved the New Kids in grade 5, to the detriment of us weirdos. But hell, who wouldn't:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbIEwIwYz-c

119. Harry Nilsson - Without You (1971)

How is this the "Lime in the Coconut" guy? We contain multitudes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERhvqJzmZAY

120. The Rolling Stones - Wild Horses

Coffee, fresh eggs, big open kitchen with an old wood floor. A barn. A pickup truck. Love in plaid shirts. This dream lives within me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhwwCWkmYoc

121. Roxy Music - 2HB (1972)

No band in history has ever done exactly what these guys did; they are singular. Point 1 on my glam rock pentagram.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEQqgDrNl3I

122. Mott the Hoople - All the Young Dudes (1972)

Not a point on the pentagram, since they only had the one song worth thinking about really and it was gifted them by Bowie, but still--this hasn't left rotation on my mental jukebox in twelve years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amnjZtNDKqk

You're exactly right about Roxy Music. Love 'em. Here's another of theirs from the same year, on The Old Grey Whistle Test, doing Ladytron.

>136 absurdeist: well, they're the best-dressed band of all time, we can conclude that at least. Even Bryan Ferry, with his ridiculous anticharisma. I find him so comical. And Eno with all that hair! I'm going to see him give an "illustrated talk" in January. So excited!

T. Rex - Children of the Revolution (1972)

Second point on the pentagram!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgcxd9wtXUE

Neil Young - Needle and the Damage Done

First Neil Young song I ever loved, back when I was like 11. I think we cared more about our fellow man then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J23Q0xR_oOQ

Shakey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHBONkfwu8w&feature=related

>138 Porius: Yes. I love how the worse his voice gets the better it gets.

125. The Wolfe Tones - A Nation Once Again

The most popular song in the world acc. to a BBC poll.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuqmRK_7QfI

126. Elton John - Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters

This is my favourite Elton John song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tRgYfQ48A0

126. Elton John - Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters... 7th grade. ;-)

good taste as always HDL. Theydontknowifitsdarkoutsideorlight.
the better indeed, MM

my fave Elton (hope I haven't jumped a year ahead, Martini), this is from '73 ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p_xAToFzck

I missed chiming in on your earlier Black Sabbath pic, so thought I'd add a ... sensitive side of Sabbath you don't hear often, from 1972 ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psm13jUwULo

>143 absurdeist: loooove that. squeaks in ahead of my secondfavourite song with "Laguna" in the title, the Legendary Pink Dots' "Laguna Beach":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlmncXQkx18

127. Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick (1972)

I hated the imaginary kid who imaginarily wrote the lyrics to this magnum opus so much. I wanted to be Little Milton, the poetical savant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzze87ZilQk

128. Neu! - Hallogallo

This is my favourite song in the world for just chillin'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg10iC4bhvo

129. Lou Reed - Perfect Day

Another point on the glam rock pentagram. This song came into my life just in time for me to fall in love with a stranger for the first time, at 16, visiting Vancouver, walking around the city till dawn and talking and talking like mad. Apparently it's really about heroin, but a perfect day's an addictive thing under any circumstances. And being addicted to them got me in some trouble later on, when I saw Lou perform and met another stranger under less carefree circumstances. This song is great.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYEC4TZsy-Y

130. David Bowie - Ziggy Stardust

How can I sum up the place this song has in my heart? I spent a year listening to this album every morning before I got out of bed. I wore silver vinyl pants, for chrissakes. Bowie brought "Ziggy Stardust" out of retirement on his first North American tour in seven years, in 2002, just for us, and my sister and I hugged so hard I dislocated her jaw.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8sdsW93ThQ&feature=related

131. Iggy & the Stooges - Search & Destroy (1973)

Glam rock pentagram complete! How is a lovable doofus like Iggy capable of coming up with something so fierce?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKYALsp-sIg

132. T. Rex - 20th Century Boy

In case you're not getting the idea, the glam rock era was a significant influence on my life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7jQnccbKPc

martin - yes not quite at my 'true' era yet, but I do have first hand memory of some of the songs being listed now.

Not sure if it is a quirk of your list but 1972 seems to be a turning point away from woodstock and towards punk, Thatcher/Reagan and all that we now know and feel.

1970/71 = Cat Stevens, Simon + Garfunkel, Joni M, Elton John and Toast & Marmalade for Tea*

1972 = T Rex, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.

------------------------------------

* I sing this whenever there is an exciting prospect of good food on the horizon, but for some reason which I only realised after rereading your thread, I sing "toast and buttered scones for tea, sailing ships etc...''

>145 zenomax: yeah, that's really true, I think. When I was about 18 I used to refer to 1972 as "the year that time began"--like, the sixties-into-the-seventies (woodstock) stuff was my parents' music first, much as I loved it; nineties alt-rock, much as I loved it, belonged to all my friends and everyone else too; my limited exposure to the punk era previously had been bands like the Clash and the Pistols that had been comfortably colonized by mall-punks, wonderful as they were. Pulp was the first band that felt like they belonged to me alone (at least in my part of the world, nobody else gave a shit except a bunch of twelve-year-old girls at home watching MuchMusic, and five years later everybody was all lovin' on Pulp and I was all "they were mine first!"), but Pulp were social, all about sleaze and class politics, and when Bowie first hit me right thurr (and I'm not embarrassed to say it was because of the Schweppes raspberry ginger ale commercial that used "Space Oddity", circa 1996), it was like there was finally something that belonged to me that was about me. You know? Glam rock was all about seeing yourself, on stage, inside out, preening and peacocking and being as affected as possible, and at that age, when you're just figuring out you have unlimited freedom to be and do, it was perfect. Ziggy Stardust was like the soundtrack to my quinceañera.

And then, yes, it led me into the new wave and all that we now know and feel. Also, your buttered scones story is sehr gemütlich and I intend to sing it with my niece this Christmas.

133. David Bowie - Drive-In Saturday

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HerjHkSreSk&feature=related

Sci-fi doo-wop. There's also an underremarked strain of mid-20th century working-class union manufacturing culture on this album (Aladdin Sane) that I love, whether it's this song's "Jung the foreman prayed at work / neither hands nor legs would burst" or "Watch That Man"'s "old fashioned band of married men / looking up to me for encouragement / it was so-so" or all of "Panic in Detroit", later redone with ROBOT VOICEZ, which I can't find online, but here is a sweet version from the Thin White Duke era:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSc8W8vhCRs&feature=related

anyway, I like that whole chip-stains-and-grease strain in his work; it's like he's the freaky cousin at the cop cousin's wedding and everyone's all a-mutter.

134. John Cale - Paris 1919

Shit, am I an Anglophile?

...

Shit.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5YHqWqhFkU

135. Lou Reed - How Do You Think It Feels? (1973)

The best song off Lou's best album, Berlin. I used the guitar line as the basis for a horrible song I wrote when I was 15 called--aheh--"Maim Me in Miami." Nobody knows that about me except my best friend, who was my former songwriting partner, and now you guys. (Even better? Our band was called "Black".)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTvd01IfQVs

136. Slade - Cum on Feel the Noize

Best song I know for rallying the troops at that mid-karaoke lull, when the beer and din are making you dazed and confused.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLsw668PVyY

137. The Rolling Stones - Angie (1973)

Supposedly about David Bowie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usEcJwrNHAg

138. Bruce Springsteen - It's Hard to be a Saint in the City

Check this performance! The Boss was so punk!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fwaS01Zg5k

Never thought of Bruce as punk, but you're right!

Not punk, but from '73 just the same, before Stevie and Lindsay joined the band ... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZeTlMpnfHk

"Angie", I think is the song where the Stones began to go seriously off the rails. Listen to the palpable blues in Mick's voice in "No Expectations" or even the growl in "Stray Cat Blues" and then listen to the contortions he puts his mouth through in "Angie". A caricature of himself. It would be a much better song, if he hadn't been so rubber-mouthed with it. It has the chops to be one of their best.

In the seventies my taste in music began to diverge into what eventually became country music.

I was more into The Band.

The Allman Brothers from just down Highway 41 in Macon.

Marshall Tucker.

Outlaws.

Bad Company.

Procol Harum.

The Doors.

The Grateful Dead.

and of course, still into these people.

By the middle of the decade I had pretty well parted ways with popular music. I had lived through, and in my own way, voting a 45 at a time, helped make, a musical revolution and couldn't move beyond it.

>149 absurdeist: nice. My favourite early Fleetwood Mac is this haunting number:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knZltCtkedk

>150 geneg: yeah, I guess our proclivities start to part, huh (although I love that Band song as well as http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EisXJSsULGM . Like Marshall Tucker as well, whom I'd never heard of until you posted--and Procol Harum and the Doors, although my doors is less Roadhouse Blues and more http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsI7lubCXuk .

(And for a real travesty, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO214E9d_vM)

139. Roxy Music - Bittersweet (1973)

Dunno what's with the vocal track and the lip movements, but fuck this video is creepy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y63ydqGAA3Y

140. Stevie Wonder - Too High

This song, to me, just sounds totally unique. If anyone knows anything that sounds like it, pass it on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8dK0iEzi1M

141. Electric Light Orchestra - Can't Get It Out of My Head (1974)

Presented here with "Eldorado Overture", but keep listening; this song is so wistful and yet so serene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuvOPSycBl4

142. The Sweet - Fox on the Run

Just really fun, man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MDCbIhTa_w

143. Neil Young - See the Sky About to Rain

This kind of mellow sweet sadness is a powerful argument that a certain kind of seventies was better than the sixties ever could be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAtH0RJzaN4

144. Tom Waits - Shiver Me Timbers

Kind of a weird choice for Tom, I suppose, but this song just gets me with the sailing. This is an early version, not the one from The Heart of Saturday Night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_F0DIJyHRs

145. Bob Dylan - Forever Young (1974)

One of two "Forever Young"s on the list. Neither is by Rod Stewart. Or Jay-Z. Or Youth Group. Or Chris Isaak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc-a1kP7ITA

146. David Bowie - Sweet Thing/Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise)

Little known, but as far as I'm concerned, Bowie's magnum opus. Heartrending future shock balladry, from his scuttled musical version of 1984.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBezS7ElQJU

147. The Rubettes - Sugar Baby Love

The only way this song could be better is if it were by an actual 1960s girl group. Or the band Showaddywaddy. Holy shit, though, these sumbitches were ugly:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qglQ0aiEGA0

148. Brian Eno - Needle in the Camel's Eye

Love the harmonies over the noise. Love Eno. Too bad he went atmospheric.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba7a9pZM6_I

152: I bet song 145 is the one I used to have sung by Joan Baez - God it was a beautiful song. She did "Diamonds and Rust" on the same album. I can't check because no YouTube at work.

I bet the other "Forever Young" is not by Alphaville either? I have to admit I was fond of it as a teen.

The Band did a great cover of "Forever Young".

Here's Fox on the Run by The Country Gentlemen. A completely different song. This version's for Anna.

This is God's music. White boy blues of the first water.

Ah, Fox on the Run! Who did I used to listen to who played that? It was a bluegrass band but I don't think it was the Country Gentlemen. Thanks geneg, I love bluegrass so much.

>155 anna_in_pdx: ha ha ha I was just plang Gene's version and my mum was like "who did I used to listen to who played that?" And it was Manfred Mann! Sweet song, Gene.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXf3QttUPlI

The other "Forever Young" IS in fact Alphaville's--should I be shamefaced admitting it? I love that futurey synthpop business. You may look forward to wicked traxx by Ultravox!, Duran Duran, and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark also.

149. Sparks - This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAzESJ62irI

150. Leonard Cohen - There is a War

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56hiB4eTzBE

151. Queen - '39 (1975)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAnpGXPYAIQ

152. Bruce Springsteen - Born to Run

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxuThNgl3YA

153. Pink Floyd - Shine On You Crazy Diamond

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyqgjCKm9nQ

154. Minnie Riperton - Lovin' You

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE0pwJ5PMDg

'75 was a good year! Love all those picks. "Born to Run" stands up as poetry, even w/out the musical accompaniment. Just read the lyrics, and be moved.

Here's a Rush song from '75 I bet'chu never heard before: I Think I'm Going Bald.

>157 absurdeist: Wow, Rush, way to shamelessly exploit a niche market.

155. David Bowie - Golden Years (1975, as a single, and then 1976 on his Station to Station album

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd2clb5T8JA

156. Brian Eno - I'll Come Running

"My dreams will pull you through that garden gate."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFz50q_QmfE

157. Roxy Music - Love is the Drug

Nice eyepatch, Bryan. Three years after Bowie and you can't keep it on either. Oh wait, I guess you're injured. Now I feel like the asshole.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n3OepDn5GU

158. Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel - Come Up and See Me (Make Me Smile)

Just smile times music. I like how he turns a Mae Westy pretext around and makes it ballsy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahra7Tn1I_M

159. Bob Dylan - Tangled Up in Blue (1975)

"if her hair was still red" slays me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwSZvHqf9qM

160. Steely Dan - Your Gold Teeth II

Nobody else sounds like Dan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMOjv-VVxAY

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all! After all, Here Comes Santa Claus.

>160 geneg: ahhh, excellent. That's a great video. Here's one of my Christmas faves, if only because it's so bizarro world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZsRUMxxI6Y

161. The Sex Pistols - Anarchy in the UK (1976)

Still feels righteous after all these years. Let's go shoplift Manic Panic hairdye from Off the Wall, the shop with the mean old Dutch hippie lady behind the counter and the naked folk on the walls. To a fourteen-year-old in 1994, that was dangerous.

162. Ivor Cutler - Beautiful Cosmos

Most perplexing of Scotsmen. I think he was on Blue Peter or something?

163. Kansas - Carry On My Wayward Son (1976)

Get ready for some FM hits.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB17uWuBrL0

164. Boston - More Than a Feeling

The guy who posted the video seems to be encouraging us to "smoke blunts". I say follow your conscience/bliss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcsVPis1iNs

165. The Ramones - I Don't Wanna Walk Around With You

Joey Ramone's message of peace, distilled.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbwTcEYUKCc

166. Blue Oyster Cult - Don't Fear the Reaper

More cowbell something something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ycOp67eLoM

167. ABBA - Knowing Me Knowing You

Not the biggest ABBA fan, but this song is really sad and makes me think about my Austrian uncles and aunts and how they were once young and had tragic loves.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUrzicaiRLU

168. Parliament - P Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up)

Strange as Japan was for me when I first touched down there in 2001, when I bought this album. It was like looking into two different amazing worlds at once.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbkcWo5I_A8

169. David Bowie - Wild is the Wind

His most amazing vocal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbpMpRq6DV4

170. Candi Staton - Young Hearts Run Free

It's a good message.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlXKfFPx7po

171. Elvis Costello - Alison (1977)

Elvis Costello and my dad have the same glasses, and my dad loves his music, and I love his music, and now I have the same glasses and ever since I got them everyone's been telling me how much I look like my dad. It's all very meta-Oedipal.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYDGFZ5e6HA

172. Weather Report - Birdland

LOOK AT THESE MOTHERFUCKERS. IF THE SEVENTIES NEEDED REDEEMING, THEY WOULD SINGLEHANDEDLY DO IT.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqashW66D7o

Martin - one of the books I got for Christmas was England's Dreaming, and its great - my other books have hardly got a look in since.

Jon Savage also wrote Teenage: the creation of youth culture and is big on the class, cultural and political undercurrents that underpinned the rise of punk.

He begins with the Situationists, Guy Debord and the riots of 1968 in France - all of these apparently influenced McLaren's view of the world. I don't believe McLaren was a political animal in the usual sense, but he saw how a dedicated group of people could cause a ripple in society, and alter its direction even if just ever so slightly.

My favourite piece so far relates to when McLaren was managing the NYDolls. He decided to change their 'look' from drag to a theme of communists! (His tactic seemed to be to make his bands the opposite of 'normal', hence the Sex Pistols wore short hair, didn't officially do drugs, had straigh stove pipe trousers, and used right wing imagery to delineate then from the hippies).

Anyway, the US journalists asked the band why this offensive theme around communism. JoHansen 'being the old trouper that he is, says "It ain't nuthin' serious, y'know". Malcolm was looking at him and thinking "you bastard, because Malcolm was serious. Lenny Kaye went over to Thunders and asked him the same question. Much to Malcolm's delight, Thunders said "What's it to ya?" Malcolm would tell this story over and over again. To him that was attitude.'

>164 zenomax: oh awesome, I am adding both of those to my list. It's always weird to me how we spend so much time on literature as a product of its social circumstances and just treat music as an interchangeable consumer good.

(It also makes you think about how valuable the Soviet Union was as just a "big other" that pretended to a moral high ground in a way that made it usable as a symbol for progressives and agitators in the West. You can't imagine that Dolls story taking place today, and we're poorer for it. Debord &c. maybe illustrate the same point in a different way--there's no cultural nexus between politics and the arts now the same as there was. Paris '68 and the Situationists are mutually reinforcing and inextricable--now, what does a progressive look like? There's a lack of that kind of essential inspiration.)

Thanks.

173. Steely Dan - Deacon Blues (1977)

Makes me think that if I'm ever fifty and single and childless, I'll still be able to feel all right about my worthless life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ck1N1I-LzWc

174. Kraftwerk - Europa Endlos

Because, I mean, what's the alternative? Clean-cut young geniuses from a troublingly fascist-inflected future past? I love music because it makes me feel like Dr. Pangloss--whatever is, is good (and if it isn't let's go dancin and fix it in the morning).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDKiPtBbBQY

175. The Congos - Fisherman

Yeah, there's reggae on the list. What?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JhTM0Lar3Q

176. Television - Marquee Moon

The most majestic, desolate music imaginable. Getting out of bed at 6 AM to clean up a car crash in the warehouse district in the icy dawn, then kicking back with a double scotch at the Brickhouse and trying to forget--but still ready to bust some fucking heads if anyone gets up at you on this of all days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlbunmCbTBA

177. Iggy Pop - The Passenger (1977)

I miss driving around.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hPnZUMBwA

178. David Bowie - Sound and Vision

The one song I think that could get me excited about shopping.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4hPnZUMBwA

179. Goblin - Suspiria (1977)

JUS LOOKA THIZ SHIT

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJUaCAIxSk4

180. Wire - Three Girl Rhumba

They were so good at doing stuff that sounded like this, and we do so much of it now, and well, I think we should stick to our strengths (hint: Ke$ha).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QykauA8p14

#164

At the bar I've been working at for the past bit, there are quite a few hardcore "punks" that come in. Pretty much interchangeable garb. The tats and t-shirts are all about the same. They'll all come in and play the same tracks, too. Standard fare. Social Distortion. FaceIIFace. Pennywise.

It's funny, but there's one old guy that will sit at the bar and start skipping their music with Haddaway, Madonna and Billy Stewart. They get pissed as fuck. Start talking shit on the guy. Call him a faggot or whatever.

I just sit and laugh my ass off. The guy's outpunking them. And they don't even have a fucking clue what's going on.

If you're interested in some later era books on music, I'd recommend Please Kill Me, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and Faking It.

>168 Jesse_wiedinmyer: ha! suburban punks fuck off. Haven't seen too many dudes like that around my parts lately--seems like it's hipster makeover or lonely nights for most in Vancouver these days, an underremarkedupon hegemony--but I remember them well. Guess you're sort of at ground zero ne. Anyway, Haddaway guy has been beating them at their own game and will forever.

(I do have a soft spot for the compilation Survival of the Fattest--here's Sydney's finest, Frenzal Rhomb, with a song for the faggots and perhaps even the Billy Stewart lovers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef-Ro4_2MRw.)

AND thanks for the recs! I've looked at Our Band Could be Your Life and liked it--the others look jus' fine. From a record-collectory or criticky perspective rather than a cultural historian's, I am indebted to Seven Years of Plenty by Ben Thompson for teaching me a thing or two about the fecund and colourful 1990s. Prolly all old news now, but a good read.

HAPPY 1978 EVERYBODY

181. Blondie - 11:59

I think this is my favourite song about driving somewhere to get some air. Everything's fucked, but we're still alive and capable of feeling so great and all we have to do is reach out and take it and let the chips fall where they may. Terrible message, but a great tune. Also, Debbie Harry is probably the oldest woman (65!) I would definitely love and bring breakfast in bed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XOibUEqZ7o&feature=related

182. Bruce Springsteen - Candy's Room

A prof in my department just gave a paper called "You Can Count on the Boss" about the parts in his songs where the rhythm section falls out and everything spins apart and then there's Bruce counting us back in and holding it all together. (There was a section on the grunts in "Born to Run"). And you can hear it in "Candy's Room"--the urgency, the racing heart, Bruce keeping us in check, bringing us into the fear and desire that he-now-we are trying to hold back because we don't know where it'll take us--and then Candy makes the choice for us and "we KISS" and the song bursts wide open and there's no going back. Bruce shoulda been a Ronette in some ways.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoH6NgwI7_Q&feature=related

Nothing wrong with a little Billy Stewart, at all...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDLDl0_pt_k

>171 Jesse_wiedinmyer: free-association, that makes me think of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZQe7qtn-JY

Misora Hibari bust rhymes like she bust yo face!

183. Magazine - Definitive Gaze (1978)

I always forget that this song even has words because the music's so good. It's like a robot in disguise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL56BMZQiAg

184. Germfree Adolescents

Isn't that what we all wanted to be?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGROSJbCPV8

185. Toto - Hold the Line

Makes me want to just do coke and pump my fist and dance forever until flesh and memories melt away and I'm an immortal coke-doing fist-pumping dancing machine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTnQfdLbi0s

186. The Cars - Just What I Needed

SO THEY WERE REALLY CARS ALL ALONG. SCANDAL

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MWJwGM2Oo8

Makes me want to just do coke and pump my fist and dance forever until flesh and memories melt away and I'm an immortal coke-doing fist-pumping dancing machine.

I don't know, brother. Been there. Done that. Wouldn't mind having the tooth back. Not all it was cracked up to be.

The Stewart/Hibari riff puts me in mind of Ekova's "Starlight in Daden."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI9QE0cQ72g

>174 MeditationesMartini: oooh, like that song. here's what it put me in mind of, although listening to it now I realize they're not all that similar really:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8jMUdC9VDQ&feature=related

187. Kraftwerk - Metropolis (1978)

"Set to scenes of the German countryside." there's that teutonic humour for ya.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2imdHACV7Lc

188. Warren Zevon - Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner

From Zevon's last-ever public appearance, on David Letterman. He died too young, like Patty Hearst when she heard the burst of Roland's thompson gun.

189. Lou Reed - Street Hassle

Lou Reed is such a monumental prick and yet so sweet and it defies the laws of thermodynamics. This is rock-bottom music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkG9BKgDvNI&feature=related

190. Giorgio Moroder - theme from Midnight Express

Soft music for a brutal story.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_GEthu7Zxg

I always preferred the reprise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J4UHD8y6no

I know this guy is probably not apropos of this thread, but he died today, and I think you're presently at the year, 1978, when he had his biggest hits: Gerry Rafferty I love that sax on "Baker Street".

http://soundcheck.ocregister.com/2011/01/04/rip-gerry-rafferty-1947-2011/41322/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5puAN1PGQw Warren Zevon

>175 Jesse_wiedinmyer: hmmm, yeah, you may just be right. Such an underrated album. Did you ever hear "Plus from Us", the Real World Records sampler? It's the record company Gabriel started, I believe, and there are musicks in much the same vein as "Last Temptation" from (i.a.) Brian Eno, Tony Levin, the Meters, William Orbit, and the Dmitri Pokrovsky Ensemble, whose song that I wanted to post is not youtubable, but here is something else pretty:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JWj46fGcgM&playnext=1&list=PLC53D43B6259...

>176 absurdeist: aw boooooo! I love Baker Street! That guy was an inspiration when I was a pudgy alto sax (non-)player in grade 5. Let us also remember Mick Karn; Japan were an amazing band.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKg3QyHF70U

>177 Porius: oh hell yes. Send lawyers guns and money! my friend used to always write that when she was in a dodgy moment. Also, this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOU1jDcWM2w

191. Michael Jackson - Don't Stop Till You Get Enough (1979)

Can't blurb this now--I'm still swooning to "Accidentally Like a Martyr".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yURRmWtbTbo

man sure was something though.

192. Gary Numan/Tubeway Army - Down in the Park

The Fat White Slug.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fofzrDD8IG8

193. Neil Young & Crazy Horse - Hey Hey My My (Out of the Blue, Into the Black)

I was gonna tell a story about how my dad was doing the floors in our kitchen and found a bunch of dry rot and gashed himself something awful and didn't take off his coveralls for two weeks and there was all this drywall dust in the cut and it started to fester and his eyes took on this crazy glint, and then one day we found RUST NEVER SLEEPS written on the fridge with those magnet poetry magnets and it was freaky freaky shit, but now all I can think is "better coveralls than those horrible t-shirts".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA-DjpLitCA

194. Gang of Four - I Found That Essence Rare

Going to see these guys in February! Hooray!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g3yqL8HQtg

195. The Slits - I Heard It Through the Grapevine

RIP Ari Up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QohoUA1Gx4M&feature=related

195. David Bowie - Look Back in Anger

I love everything about this song. I love the imagery of the sulky angel, Eno's synth foghorn, the zombie Lennon and McCartney voices. Everything.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJjASV20kc

197. Elvis Costello & the Attractions - Oliver's Army (1979)

I had no idea what an ugly dude Elvis Costello actually is when you look at him close-up for a while. And a bad lipsyncher too. But I'm still gonna paint my kid's room just like this stage one day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JGYKCvWnQc

198. Yellow Magic Orchestra - Rydeen

These guys, on the other hand, have to be the best-dressed band of 1979. And that video is so Guitar Hero.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk6o4GWFIV8

199. The Clash - Spanish Bombs (1979)

My favourite thing about the Spanish is how they still do the closed-fist salute from the Civil War.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzvggodmBzk

180. The Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star

First video ever shown on MTV. Still seems futuristic, at least to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiJ9AnNz47Y

Your omission of Big Star is unacceptable.

>183 Jesse_wiedinmyer: yeah, Chilton never turned my crank really, although he has moments, most notably:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP2t6flTmyY

AND LO, 1980 DAWNED, AND IN THE EAST, I AROSE.

181. Motorhead - Ace of Spades

And Lemmy played at the christening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZjEk2QEb8c

182. David Bowie - Ashes to Ashes

In visual terms Scary Monsters is my favourite Bowie era by far. And I love how this tune ties his seventies together, and how it's about anxiety but still fun to sing along to, and the "axe to break the ice" and the "little green wheels following me" get me every time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMThz7eQ6K0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pte3Jg-2Ax4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNKSs1J38EA

>185 Jesse_wiedinmyer: no, I mean, i'm mostly with you. They were a great band. Just not--as it turns out--top 500 material. Although "Kangaroo" and to a lesser extent this one, were near misses:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsQ977u8Wuk

183. Joy Division - Atmosphere (1980)

Kind of want this video to play at my funeral, but I guess it would bring people down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHsRhWXJeOQ

184. Ozzy Osbourne - Crazy Train

So 'Crazy Train' it is then!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1c4NpYXocU&feature=related

>185 Jesse_wiedinmyer: no, I mean, i'm mostly with you. They were a great band. Just not--as it turns out--top 500 material. Although "Kangaroo" and to a lesser extent this one, were near misses:

If you keep up this way, I assure you that there will be fisticuffs.

Kick his polite Canadian ass Jesse!

It'll be a regular donnybrook in the thread. Speaking of Canadians, you ever hear the joke about how you get Canadians to leave at the end of the night, 'Rique?

Ask them? Is it ask them?

Yep. That's the one.

It's funny because it's true.

One of my favorite jokes ever...

Ha ha, I went from #199 back to 180 because the year was 1980! Numbering corrected from here on in.

205. Young Marble Giants - Credit in the Straight World (1980)

Quietly venomous manifesto.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH4jpJEIgc8

206. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Enola Gay

Oh goddamn, listen to how good these guys sound live. Reunion tour pls.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szIx2hOiVWs

207. One Day More (Les Miserables)

My friend Bin and I like to sing this at parties. Probably lego Martin and lego Bin do it at lego parties too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4qgp_c32B4

208. Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime

Seeing David Byrne looking so good here makes me feel even worse for Elvis Costello in "Oliver's Army".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1wg1DNHbNU

209. The Jam - Pretty Green

A lot of Jam songs prolly deserve to be on here, but this one is just so ... rife with possibilities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8gn5GLqRR0

210. Ultravox - Vienna

One of my five favourite songs. About once a year I swear "only synthpop from now on" (it just feels right), and it never lasts, but it always feels good while I'm saying it. Also, Vienna rules and its eternal bubble of aesthetic bliss--cold air, steamy cafe, newspaper, food, wine, art, music, all these things seem so real there--is the only thing that makes me feel good about hypocritical, resentful, deluded old Austria's prospects. And: Check Midge Ure's moustache.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9WdUgn0XkU

211. Falco - Der Kommissar (1981)

But Midge is just a fetishy foreign Austrophile like me. Let's hear from an echter Oesterreicher--you should all watch the "official video" once, and wince, and cry, but this more subdued version has something, I think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ_m4_wnPNw&feature=related

212. Journey - Don't Stop Believin'

I'm sure we all already love this song and can sing it in our sleep, but hey. Hey. Watch this. It's not Journey, but watch this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kXbHf1SwGk

Journey was my favorite band in junior high. I took heat like you wouldn't believe from the cooler hard rock/metal crowd who questioned my heterosexuality in very crass -- and with what now are very foul homophobic epithets -- just because I liked a band with a lead singer who could hit those high notes so high that sometimes he sounded like a girl! Today, I'd still stand Steve Perry up against just about anybody (except maybe Freddie Mercury) as being the greatest rock vocalist of all time.

and, Martini, since we're at 1981 ... oh what a blessed year 1981 was for NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal) and so I simply have no choice but to link here two songs off a vicious metal record that ranks in my top ten metal albums of all time.

The Ides of March/Wratchild

from Iron Maiden's classic second lp, Killers (LP).

Enlarge the screen so you can see the gorey and gruesome grandeur of Maiden's mascot, "Eddie" on the prowl after a kill in the backstreets of London ...

and play it loud goddamnit!

Here you are, Martin. Kind of sprawling. And I had to stop myself from going any further. Even though I ignored massive swaths, genre-wise. That's what I ended up with after geeking out on Hot Chip for 6 hours yesterday. (Even now, I'm sitting here thinking to myself about tracks I was going to include that didn't make it in.)

and forget the NWOBHM in '81 ... what about that Heavy Metal from Down Under (HMFDU), exemplified by the incomparable, AC/DC?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMUgmU_Hsjc

I'm so glad I'm beating those slickish and zenomaxish avant garde punk to the punch! Woo hoo! Gotta be up in three hours for work! I'm so STOKED!!!

Thanks, guys! As soon as it's not 3 AM I will listen to and love each of those songs.

But before bed:

213. Altered Images - I Could be Happy 1981

NEW WAVE GIRLS.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1O3aoBhgXY

214. Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark - Joan of Arc

They have two songs called "Joan of Arc" and the other one's good too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jll8cMA_CIY&feature=related

215. Fela Anikulapo Kuti and Africa 70 - Original Sufferhead

Hardly any Fela on Youtube! Booooo. Anyway, this was the handsomest most dangerous rock 'n' roll rebel ever and here is something else good from him with video of Nigeria.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6BiAwD-nY8

216. The Go-Gos - Our Lips are Sealed

AKA "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OULlWNCqDQ

217. The Human League - The Things That Dreams are Made of

So many bad remixes on youtube, and then just when you start to despair, you run across one that's a revelation. But why no words? God our pop stars are a bunch of stupid fucks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niRy8u5HrH8

218. Queen & David Bowie - Under Pressure

This video is amazing. Oh,, uh, but I just found out there's some get ads of youtube boycott on tomorrow, so ... I dunno, get off my lawn?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYXKaAzEJrk

Love The Go-Gos and that Queen and David Bowie collaboration. Classic. And some powerful lyrics if you've ever listened to them close.

I'm not a fan of the band, but I do love this song from '81, later featured in The Wedding Singer ... it's Huey Lewis and the News', Do You Believe in Love.

Gawd, I really need to get to sleep. Although, zombies are in these days. Maybe I'll impersonate one tomorrow! Woo hoo!

Memories of Claire Grogan of Altered Images (and Lister's girlfriend in the early series of Red Dwarf)!!!

Still enjoying all your work Martin.

Jesse: Radio City is a towering work, isn't it? I've been listening, coincidentally, to #1 Record through Sister Lovers alot in the last two weeks. My favorite Chilton solo is the song Like Flies to Sherbet - which, while sharing some traits with Kangaroo, is better.

I find the brother band's version of this song more compelling: Our Lips Are Sealed

Steve Perry is indeed a great singer and the songs are good. Even my punk rock kid self admitted that. But Huey Lewis? Surely you jest, EF?

Oh, and for my funeral - hopefully not to occur anytime soon - Maggot Brain

Huey Lewis and the News was Patrick Bateman's favorite band, and you ask me if I jest? That band has heart and soul like no other, slick, and you know it!

But Tom Petty is a much shuperior American rock and roller. Appeals very much to the plugguggly in me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUTXb-ga1fo
Del would of course be Del Shannon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiJg0A3RrTk&feature=related
Lapwings all
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WowZLe95WDY&feature=related

I thought Alex Chilton was the lead singer for the Box Tops and went on to a second career as writer and publisher of a series of auto mechanics manuals.

204: and what do you think about the traveling willburys (or however they are spelled)?

I love them, though George Harrison is no longer on the terrestrial plane.

1982 - The Fall's 5th album, Hex Enduction Hour.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xkj0U0cwPDo

Coming up - 1983 (I am guessing - although don't want to pre-empt any time tunnels Martin may get into. 1743 anyone? 2050 maybe?) Anyway, 1983 sees the first appearance in terms of published music of ....... Current 93

>207 Porius: Nor Roy Orbison, may he rest in peace.

Oh god, I've been up for 48 hours working for the interests of my class enemies by helping this Kuwaiti woman with jewels and probably a throne not fail her dissertation by turning it from no good to barely adequate on a 48-hour deadline (while reisting her blandishments to "just write it for me", I note,lest you get the wrong idea.) I look how Enrique in >200 absurdeist: feels. What? Oh yeah, the point was, Petty helped and MArk E. Sith helped, weirdly, and the Wilburys helped despite being not here and dead, and learning that the girl from Altered Images was Lister's girlfriend but Huey Lewis helped most of all. Robert Palmer can suck it.

Time to post a slurry of videos and then pass it uot.

219. Tom Tom Club - Wordy Rappinghood (1981)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsGFH_Q7KMs

220. Toto - Africa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azVqekQBK8g

221. Iron Maiden - Children of the Damned (1982)

MAH favourite Maiden song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLBTl5ZsPew

222. Sparks - Eaten by the Monster of Love

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEFC0PlbUdA

223. Japan - Ghosts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNYYRl86R4g

224. The Stranglers - Golden Brown

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkR_HafkYak

225. Prince - Little Red Corvette

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWTqAaWskCo

226. Tears for Fears - Mad World

Ha ha, their album is called "The Hurting." That makes this beautiful sad song seem so stupid.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20qZtnODB0w

227. Duran Duran - Rio

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92d7TvSjHGw

228. Klaus Nomi - Simple Man

Another funeral candidate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFaZyHxQGYQ

Oh, oops, Wordy Rappinghood was 229. This is 230: The Jam - Town Called Malice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfpRm-p7qlY

And finally, speaking of the music of 2050:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5cWWV0KNDg

or 2000, whatever. Goodnight everybody!

oops! I meant this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwyuB8QKzBI&feature=related

Aahhhh yes indeedy, Children of the Damned off the metallic masterpiece, The Number of the Beast (LP). Bruce Dickinson's first appearance with the band and Clive Burr's last. There's not a dud on that record. Any record that includes the voice of Vincent Price can't be bad either. 1982 was another outstanding year for classic metal. And what another great album cover.

Nighty night.

But wait! ... Let the punks among us roll their collective eyes ... it's okay

Martini, have you heard of The Iron Maidens? Here they are, the world's only all-female tribute band to Iron Maiden (and these bad ass maidens kick arse), performing another classic off the Beast, The Prisoner.

The Iron Maidens?

AC/DShe have the better name.

But do they have the better music?

And what about Judas Priestesses?

226: I remember "Mad World" as being prominently featured on "Donnie Darko" which is a movie my kids and I are very fond of - and not only because of the dark story etc. but because of the '80s soundtrack.

Do you remember poor Anton Maiden?

R.I.P. Anton Maiden!

Thanks for the sweet memories slick.

>213 absurdeist:, 214 oh, I like that. One of the major things I have to thank Dungeons & Dragons for, aside from being my imagination practice and keeping me away from girls, is the campaign where the characters were Ed Zeppelin, Jack Sabbath, Motley Stüe, Stacey/DC, and Cheap Rick. They were a band of plucky metal-loving orphans and oh, how they/we laughed.

>216 anna_in_pdx: I've been watching the BBC's Ashes to Ashes, which is a sequel to Life on Mars, if you've seen that, and just as fantastic. The music of the 80s in general, and "Mad World" in particular (along with the title song, obvs) feature prominently.I've never seen Donnie Darko! Should get on that.

>217 slickdpdx: I don't even know who that dude is, but nobody has ever deserved to die less. Thanks for making me sad before bedtime.

231. Pulp - Blue Girls (1983)

The first song on the list by my favourite ever band. This one's, like, their early stuff, real obscurr, you wouldn't know it.

232. Elvis Costello - Every Day I Write the Book

Nobody's aged well like this dude. Gives me hope, it do.

233. The Eurythmics - Here Comes the Rain Again

I wish Annie Lennox was my aunt. I bet she'd do it if I asked nicely and wasn't weird.

234. The Clash - Know Your Rights

A public service announcement with guitars. So lovably stupid and yet so ballsy and defiant.
235. The Cure - The Lovecats

The song that makes it okay, for 3m 34s, for teenage boys to act as wonderfully wonderfully wonderfully wonderfully pretty as they want and not get called fag.

236. Peter Schilling - Major Tom (Coming Home)

NEUE DEUTSCHE WELLE! ALTE JAPANISCHE ANIME! THE TWENTIETH CENTURY.

237. Ryuichi Sakamoto - Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence

Just fills me with so much joy and peace that I had to include it twice. You got the original version above, but hey, if you like wood or warmth or whiskey or wombats, check this one too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGs_vGt0MY8

238. David Bowie - Modern Love

Look at Tommy fuckin' Stone there. I always start to think this song is too stupid for words and take it off, but then I end up singing along and getting happy instead.

239. Taco - Puttin' on the Ritz

NUFF SAID

240. Heaven 17 - Temptation

In conclusion, 1983 was a sexy, sexy year.

Taco. Huh. There's a someone I haven't thought about in a long, long time. If I root around in my basement I could probably find this album.

>221 MeditationesMartini: lucky! every version of it I've tried to download has been in some way corrupted or impossible. Font of everything though it may be, there's still some stuff the internet can't give.

241. REM - 7 Chinese Brothers

This aesthetic is still sort of my reference point for what being a young adult should be like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSMnNxedQSY

242. Alphaville - Forever Young

I have zero idea why peoples hack on these guys. What could be better than this?

(cold war) + (hairspray) = (dancing)

I haven't checked in on this thread for a bit, but you missed THE 1979 choice:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrXu97GVVqc

THAT was 1979. This was also 1979: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nu2QX3GU-U

-- from one who was there

PS,

I'm assuming I'm just missing it and that it is up there somewhere -- where's the Patti Smith? Radio Ethiopia? Horses? The first line of this alone was one of the best things that happened in the '70s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxygqSTO1lQ

Here's my top song of 1982:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN9-K0aZXRg

It was a new, new world.

And another addition, perhaps just to scare you a bit: the classic, laid back, ultimate version of "My Way", from the early 80s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHEwCagBtN0

And a real 60s throwback kind of sound, circa 1979: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHG2LJGfEdw

221: I was shocked, shocked to hear a live version of Forever Young recently. Lots of mamafrackin profanity!

>223 A_musing:-5 Okay, SHIRTS. That was incredible. Equal parts 50s chanteuse, Pictures of Matchstick Men, faux-punk and lazors from 1985. Wow. Must learn more. Riffing perhaps both on that and Lene:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHnaWfNGOoE

Patti Smith somehow never grabbed me the way I know she's capable of, but I'm pretty sure that's evidence of something wrong with me. Here's something that coulda made the list, if Tommy James hadn't gotten in there first:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdhonK8NMm8

and Grandmaster Flash, also on the list for a long long time till I removed him at the last min. Here's some more new new world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lDCYjb8RHk

And my favourite Nina cover:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzdWeMsFnwo&feature=related

243. Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - In the Ghetto (1984)

So affecting. I love when Nick growls it up.

244. Foreigner - I Want to Know What Love Is

Transcendental. No joke.

245. Prince & the Revolution - I Would Die 4 U

And in a crazy James Browned-out version, here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZNSqsgCf0M

246. Van Halen - Jump

Okay, apparently 1985 is the year when my tastes take a sharp turn into cruddy mainstream pop, but come on. Listen to that synth solo. It was my alarm for like three years.

247. Echo & the Bunnymen - The Killing Moon

WHY was this not a James Bond theme?

248. Cocteau Twins - Lorelei

This is too much like truffles and flashbulbs and little dogs and tickling with feathers.

Since you liked my Shoits (which is the proper pronounciation), here's a whole concert, featuring most of their songs from Streetlight Shine (but not Milton at the Savoy, one of my favorites), and with an interesting cover or two thrown in: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4749107466672140581#

They were a CBGB favorite. Yes, I still have the vinyl.

>229 A_musing: oh awesome! Can't wait to give that a watch and a listen, although I'll miss the broken French. I also added the first song you posted to the list for 1979 (it bumped Michael Jackson).

249. The Legendary Pink Dots - Tower One (1984)

One of my all-time top three favourite bands, the Dots appeal to that part of me that is dark and sad but also filled with imagination and delight. My ex-girlfriend and I used to pretend that Edward Ka-Spel was in the easy chair in the corner in his muu-muu, watching us sleep.

251. Kate Bush - Cloudbusting (1985)

Something's fucked with the numbering. I'm just gonna skip 250 and hope it irons out. Anyway, here is Kate Bush inventing steampunk.

252. Stan Bush - The Touch (1985)

Has there ever been a better time to be a kid than the 1980s?

253. The Pogues - Dirty Old Town

Dunno why sentimentality has such a bad name.

254. REM - Feeling Gravitys Pull (1985)

For the first two bars alone.

255. The Jesus & Mary Chain - Just Like Honey

Unlike everything else, which I learned about years after the fact in super embarrassing ways, I knew all about this amazing song and band well before Lost in Translation. RIP, Scarlett Johannsen and Ryan Reynaolds's forbiddden love (2007-2011).

I love early R.E.M. Wasn't a fan of Jesus & Mary Chain back then in H.S., but that's a good song!

I need to go back to 1982 and add this little known, underappreciated, mostly forgotten gem, later prominently featured in Valley Girl.

It's The Payola$ doing Eyes of a Stranger.

>233 absurdeist: oh shit, I love that song but I never knew who it was by. They sort of put Sting to shame, don't they? Thanks.

256. Marillion - Kayleigh

Sometimes it hurts to think of all those bands that could have been Marillion if they'd just upped their rainbow quotient a little. Fred Durst could have gone down as a genius instead of history's greatest villain.

>257 anna_in_pdx:.%20Shriekback%20-%20Nemesis</a></b>%0A<br>%0A%0A<br>%0AI%20realize%20this%20is%20maybe%20more%20of%20a%20niche%20sound%20than%20" rel="nofollow" target="_top">

257. Shriekback - Nemesis

I realize these guys are more of a niche sound, but I think the observation I made about Marillion still holds true in a small way. Like, how can you (not you. a goth. unless you're a goth. then you) possibly justify being a goth when Shriekback have been being a goth so much better than you for a whole human generation?

258. Prince - Raspberry Beret

Of course prince is the exception to the whole "everyone should be more like Marillion and/or Shriekback" thing. Prince is doin' just fine.

Well here's two songs that people who actually lived through the eighties as grownups will probably mock me for.

259. A-Ha - Take On Me

260. Starship - We Built This City

OMG, I absolutely adored that song by A-Ha. A couple of years ago there was a remake that was pretty much identical and I thought, why bother?

Not Starship, though. Argh.

The astonishing thing is that Grace Slick's first appearance on your list is at 260 with Starship - am I missing an earlier appearance?

I note you're not including as much Jazz as you were a couple decades ago. How about the Koln Concert for 1975? By now I'd have sprinkled in some McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock as well.

Then there is Santana...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLDalZ4-53g Don't stop at the end of the drum solo!

I think there's a twisted Nietzschean obscenity to "We Built this City" that appeals to something deep and totalitarian within us children of Reagan-Thatcher. It's like, you simultaneously mock and dream of bombing the Russians with ICBMs filled with GI Joes, forever. The mocking allows the dreaming, underwrites it.

Sam, I loves me some Airplane, but 67, 68, 69, tough years, tough years. "3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds" or whatever that song's called could have been on the list.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Etv16q0iMNw

Also: "White Rabbit", and lawd knows this video makes me wanna put it on a hellllllllova lot more.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WANNqr-vcx0

But it just didn't quite happen.

As for the jazz, I dunno--if I had gone back to the fifties, there would have been a lot (a LOT) more of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4TbrgIdm0E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXcRFAJDF0c&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPHtQn1t1n4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4DTR0I7xhA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuM5suBrBy8

etc., and now you've stirred up all kinds of weird young-old feelings from being a teen who got up at six every morning to go play songs by a bunch of old dead wild men. But okay, isn't it, like, Wynton Marsalis syndrome? Plenty of good jazz comes out all the time, but for me it's kinda so what because so much of it is in the same vein as the old stuff that has the patina of time travel on it. I have a lot of time for seeing someone like Joe Lovano or Sonny Fortune (I was a saxophonist, yes) if they roll through town, but I don't know that they've done anything that didn't just recap what Trane and Miles and etc etc were doing in the wayback. It seems like jazz's main body ossified in the fifties--the kind of main-trunk movement through dixie, swing, bop, etc etc stopped, the core of standards became kind of hard bop, cool jazz, five-man combo kind of noise (I mean, this is ridiculously broad, but)--and it kept sending off shoots for a while, and some of those are reflected--there is a bit of fusion on the seventies list, and there could have been more, could have been some Mahavishnu or some earlier Weather Report. And free jazz, yeah, maybe. It's not my favourite thing, but I did have Ornette Coleman and Rahsaan Kirk on an early version of the list.

But now that we're up into the eighties, is jazz even growing shoots anymore? I like "Rockit", but stuff like "Watermelon Man" for me is just so grade nine stage band. And, like, Chick Corea? Meh. McCoy Tyner I love on all my favourite Coltrane albums, but I haven't really heard his solo stuff. Should!

And again, maybe just ignorance talking, but who's doing new and interesting things in jazz in the 21st? "Electro-acoustic fusion" like Bela Fleck and Metalwood is pretty low on my list of exciting. I like a lot of that Klezmery gypsy swing stuff that's going on lately (LISTEN TO THIS I SAW THEM ON MONDAY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmvEjivsICQ), but I am unedumacated. There have been lots of indie bands like TV on the Radio:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ga6ZAbRXR3Q&feature=related

and Battles (involving Anthony Braxton's son Tyondai) that are appropriating elements of jazz, but not really jazz per se.

I guess the long and the short is that if there's been jazz musicians in the last thirty years doing anything new I either don't know about it or don't get excited, and if they're just exhuming the mid-20th century and dancing the corps around the yard I'd rather go to the source and then it's more like I have a time machine.

But! I really like to learn. So please, please, post things of which I might be unaware:)

As for Santana, first, THANK YOU for that video. Whoa.

It's weird, because I totally get into him sometimes, although I waited too long in some ways--for me he'll always be the guy whose greatest hit was "Smooth" feat. Matchbox 20's Rob Thomas, which Billboard just ranked as the second-greatest song of all time behind "The Twist". You know? That's what Santana represents to me--infinite baby-boomer smugness. But Abraxas is witchy and incredible, don't get me wrong. It's just ... okay: "We Built This City" is so far over the top that it's grotesque, and that makes it interesting, but Santana, when I can escape from myself and pretend it's 1971 and I'm 17 and like "THIS MUSIC!!!!!" then I love it, love it. Live performances like this one help. But other times, he's just the sound of, like, VH1 Storytellers, or making it a Blockbuster night, or at the worst McDonalds french fries. It makes me feel sour, and don't like feeling sour:/

Here's two songs I certainly don't feel sour about:) Both of them probably seemed pretty corporate at the time, but now they seem like curious artifacts, and that makes me feel good about them in a way that I just can't about so much of the post-seventies sixties. (But note that Henri turned me around about Tattoo You awhile back, and I loooooove new Scott Walker, and Lou Reed, and I don't know why Santana should be so imbricated with the military-industrial complex and the Kinks or whatever get off scot-free. I'll just blame it all on Rob Thomas, stop blabbering and have breakfast:)

261. Alphaville - Afternoons in Utopia (1986)

262. Europe - The Final Countdown

"I guess the long and the short is that if there's been jazz musicians in the last thirty years doing anything new I either don't know about it or don't get excited, and if they're just exhuming the mid-20th century and dancing the corps around the yard I'd rather go to the source and then it's more like I have a time machine."

Jazz is really good at exhuming. It's what it does. Pulls out the old standards and twists and turns.

That's part of what makes it really great for fusing cultures. Here's the Indo-Pak Coalition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrHTeqB-1XU

Toumani Diabate channelling Koln concert vibes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DEKQjj6Ga0&feature=related

McCoy Tyner and the Latin Allstars channelling the 'Trane days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rqIAWSorjs

But you know, I take real offense at the notion that Jazz is just regurgitated music from the middle of the last century, when there is so much more to regurgitate:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWuFLbSSmGg&feature=related

None of those will blow you away quite like the Santana/Woodstock drum solo, but, boy, they are just wonderful music. Let them seep in for a while and they'll be part of you.

Now I've got to find some more Santana. He's a guy with 10 different careers - smooth is just a sort of minor fifth act where I'm concerned.

Leviticus 12:16 And the Lord said, "Starship is an abomination in my sight and an outrage in my ears."

Unless I am mistaken, the drum solo intro to She Has Funny Cars from Surrealistic Pillow was used as the intro to Wide World of Sports.

Here's a version of Watermelon Man that was popular in '61 or '62.

As a bonus: From 1958 Quiet Village by Martin Denny.

Another jazz great I just thought of!

As we all know, Rap was the bastard child of a menage-a-trois involving Jazz, Disco and Poetry somewhere in the Bronx in the late 70s. You've got to remember the Jazz father of Rap: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtBy_ppG4hY

Here's his most popular: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wglq9xFk1Qc

>241 A_musing: ugh, okay, okay, you got me. All of those were amazing. So Mahanthappa is the sax player? Here is something else I dug up:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZ04Z_9Z4mE

And Diabate is totally a fave--here is a song I love from his album (1999?) with Taj Mahal--the focus is more in Taj, but the kora playing really makes the song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f19ibVcnFKI

And YES YES YES to Keith Jarrett. makes me think of Third Stream guys like Gunther Schuller:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag5UklJRyis

and in a considerably more jazzical vein, this from Lennie Tristano:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DadXI5R7Td4

Mahanthappa is the sax player. He is absolutely astonishing. The Apti piece you have up there is one of my most played ipod tunes. And he has a ton of interesting projects. Check out his web page project list: http://rudreshm.com/projects

If you play the one on the bottom, he and Vijay Iyer, I think Vijay is another of the truly extraordinary jazz musicians around now.

I hadn't seen the Taj/Diabate. Cool.

I think I've mentioned before the music group I'm involved with around here, bmop, but we've done some Gunther Schuller pieces, and I've gotten to meet the man at some of our receptions, and he is really brilliant.

I don't know Tristano, but that was very good. I'll be looking up more of his stuff.

>242 geneg: Gene, they just renovated Vancouver's old Waldorf Hotel, including a lovingly restored tiki bar, and my life will not be complete until I hear that Martin Denny there, buzzed on tee martoonies. Thanks.

263. Talk Talk - Happiness is Easy

Melancholy melodies.

>264 MeditationesMartini:.%20Genesis%20-%20Invisible%20Touch</a></b>%0A<br>%0A%0A<br>%0APhil%20Collins%20seems%20like%20he%20really%20enjoys%20what%20he%20does.%0A<br>%0A%0A<br>%0A<b><a%20href=" rel="nofollow" target="_top">265. Bon Jovi - Livin' on a Prayer

The key change always throws me when I try to sing along, but frantic fistpumping usually saves the day.

266. XTC - Sacrificial Bonfire

This beautiful song makes me proud to be a scion of the Celts. That which is painful is to be banished. It belongs to another world.

267. REM - Swan Swan H

Jesus, look how young and pretty Michael Stipe is. (Although I do admit to being partial to his current beard and semidetached moustache combo.

268. The Smiths - There is a Light That Never Goes Out

Kind of a mopey year, 1986!

269. The Eurythmics - Thorn in My Side

Okay, this is my favourite song off my favourite album by one of my favourite bands. I listened to it over and over again when I was seven and dreamed about what grownup relationships would be like. I was super into falling in love, and now it's 23 years later and I've just started seeing someone quite wonderful, and the part at the beginning where Annie Lennox sings "Yeah!" to her rose with a look of horror on her face makes me think of her so hard. L'chaim!

270. The Pet Shop Boys - West End Girls

So we've just had Stipe, Mozza, Annie, and now the Boys. The mid-80s are evidently underrecognized for their clean, nubile androgynous beauty.

>243 A_musing: YES to Gil. Here's something recentish (1999 I think) that I think captures his spirit. (Also, between this and Toumani, I think 1999 is needing some rethought.)

But surely Scott-Heron's most popular is this?

>245 A_musing:. You met Schuller? Jealous! Although Pat Metheny did once mock me by pronouncing my name in an ersatz brogue. But he really doesn't compare.

Have you heard Osvaldo Golijov? I think he's pretty great.

271. Pet Shop Boys - Always on My Mind (1987)

Pardon the sound quality. I just wanted to post the video for the Lou Reed costume and the fireman or whatever he is. I think I actually prefer the Elvis version of this, but 1972 is a much harder year to break into than 1987.

272. New Order - Bizarre Love Triangle

and a bizarre life altogether, n'est-ce pas?

273. Gerard Mcmann - Cry Little Sister

I cut Bauhaus and kept Shriekback and this. Guess I like my goths a little gleeful and evil and not just sooooooo depressed. Maybe?

274. The Pogues feat. Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York

It has always been my dream to marry someone who will sing this with me at our wedding.

I really don't think you can do '87 without The Joshua Tree. Regardless of whether or not you like U2 or not...

>248 Jesse_wiedinmyer: DINNAE TEST ME

Gonna be a donnybrook.

275. Belinda Carlisle - Heaven is a Place on Earth (1987)

Epic optimism.

276. Whitesnake - Here I Go Again

Oh mannn, look at his hand tremble with sincerity at the start there. Okay, at least three amazing memories surround this song:

1. Spring of 2004, on the way out to see David Bowie in Kelowna (!), blasting the driving tape my friend made for the trip (other standouts included Talking Heads' "Road to Nowhere", Electric Six's "My Synthesizer", and Tom Cochrane's Life is a Highway", because her dad saved Tom Cochrane's life once or something), going over the Coquihalla Highway, which has to be one of the top three most beautiful transit arteries in Western NA, leaning out all the windows waving our sundry liquor bottles (not the driver!) and blasting this song so loud and all singing along. I buried my bottle of Jack and sequined top under the mountain peak.

2. Munich, spring 2008. I am wilding through central Europe with a dear friend from high school who has turned into something of a dickhead banker master-of-the-universe type in the meantime, and so we are hitting the bottle hard to disguise the fact that we have nothing to talk about anymore, and we go on this weird pub crawl and I get all separated from everybody else with this American girl who was from LA but going to school in South Carolina or the other way around, and we're totally lost, and after a while we give up and go into this karaoke bar to have a night regardless, and there's everybody else, and my friend is getting all ready to sing Journey but the guy on stage is belting out Whitesnake and every time he completes a line of the chorus it's "Here I go again on my own" and everybody yells "FUCK! YOU!" and "going down the only road I've ever known" "FUCK! YOU!" and those fuck yous will echo in my brain till the end of town because they was shouted with conviction.

3. February 2010. The Olympics have just rolled through town and we have brought off a successful "Red Tent" protest, a tent city and associated carnival to bring attention to housing issues in the city as Vancouver council approves a $100-million loan to the Olympic committee to keep 'em solvent. We are having a party to celebrate, and I am feeling amazing about it all, especially because I have just broken up with the love of my life-to-date and am kind of a mess about it and this is one of the first inklings that there's still happiness to be had. The mood takes, and I get up on a table and sing "Here I Go Again" a cappella and everybody stops and listens and cheers and joins in and there is song for the rest of the night. It's one of the first steps on the road back to being cool and not crazy. Thanks, Whitesnake.

Great stories.

Can't share the Here I Go Again love, though. The only song that rocks on that album was the first single, Still of the Night.

I like earlier Whitesnake a lot though: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW4LQN1Bx1Q

I always confuse them with these guys...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHZ79InLGRY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrPJgnOXjy8

How dare you insult the once mighty Whitesnake with those sniveling, wussified White Lions! Wretched "metal".

>252 absurdeist: GodDAMN. Like an eighties version of bluesy Led Zeppelin. Your picks are always better than mine, Enrique ... and yet I'm stuck with the musical life story I got.

>253 Jesse_wiedinmyer: I'm kind of into that first song, actually. It reminds me of being twelve and thinking hair metal was the funniest thing in the world and we were so beyond that with our army boots and our precious little social consciences, and now White Lion just sounds like Soul Asylum. We are all Hegelians in the end, I guess?

Also, I always confuse those guys with the band Lion.

277. The Vaselines - Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam

Saw these heroes at the Biltmore this fall; blacked out, got my picture taken falling all over a less-than-impressed Frances McKee.

278. Prince - Kiss

Hope this is the right song--Prince likes to take his music of youtube, and i'm not in a place where I can listen right now. But this song is a sexy motherfucker, and Prince is an indelible melody.

279. Michael Jackson - Man in the Mirror

On the other hand, Bad was originally supposed to be a duet between Jackson and Prince, and I will hate prince forever for refusing to make that happen.

280. Guns 'n' Roses - Sweet Child of Mine

This was my introduction, when I was like 8, to the fact that there were creatures called teenagers, and they were mad and bad and dangerous to know, and while my parents listened to Marianne Faithfull and Stevie Winwood, they smoked hung out in pool halls and rocked GnR and Mr. Big. I guess the fact that I posted this sissified love song and not Welcome to the Jungle shows why they pantsed me. (I also prefer McCartney to Lennon. Speaking broadly.)

And a retroactive 271. U2 - With or Without You, knocking off the Pet Shop Boys. Jesse was right--these guys HAD to be on here for '87, and they actually were and then they got lost in the shuffle somehow but now it's back.. I remember just before moving home from Japan we went karaoking and I was all melancholy about leaving and advance-missing the girlfriend I had there, and she got up and sang this song in her note-perfect way and her cute accent and we were all weepy, and then my friend Bin got up and did Bohemian Rhapsody--all the parts, himself--and it was a scene of indescribable butchery and ruined the wistful mood in the most hilarious way possible. Talk about blood on the dance floor. Anyway, many thanks to Ovid and Bono for this classic.

I've always loved the video for "With or Without You" for the simple fact that I don't believe Bono ever does anything with the guitar.

See the stone set in your eyes....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM

Martini man, I dig your musical life story, and Weird Al's purdy tight too.

You might be interested to know that Here I Go Again was a remake ... of a Whitesnake song by the very same title, released five years previously off their excellent '82 release, Saints and Sinners : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGIHaKCeVYk Didn't care for the song then; thought even less of it (and the band) for being so hard up for material that they'd plagiarize themselves (and make millions in the process).

You were too young to know at the time "Here I Go Again" came out that Whitesnake was once a well respected, "bluesy Zeppelinesque" hard rock band with a dedicated underground following in the States (but pretty huge in Europe, though admittedly, the Brits lambasted them frequently as Zep ripoffs) that had been around for a decade preceding their '87 self-titled MTV monstrosity. "Is This Love" is even worse.

How 'bout some Love Hunter going back to, I think, '79. Nice understated, not over the top at all, album cover too.

>257 anna_in_pdx: ha ha, amazing. Not sure all of those songs were actually in D, but he chose his bits cannily.

>258 absurdeist: not over the top at all. I feel like me and that album cover have ... things to discuss. And yeah, Whitesnake's trajectory makes me think of Van Halen, or, um ... Foo Fighters--I'm sure there are better examples--where the songs they're best known for are a lot more poppy than their early stuff. Guess I'm a sucker for saccharine.

281. The Sugarcubes - Birthday (1988)

Nobody sounds like the Sugarcubes. Guess that's true of solo Bjork too, but this is in a friendlier way. This song makes me think of the little girl from Tonari no Totoro.
282. Steve Earle - Copperhead Road

Used to listen to this in high school with my friend Ryan. Him and his uncle and his cousin shot a cow one time. Strapped it to the top of the car, butchered it in the driveway and when we were all like "oh god"!" Ryan was like "No, it's cool. It was a wild cow."

293. Dinosaur Jr - Freak Scene

The cliche about grunge was always "punk+metal", but that's not what I hear. I hear bands like Dinosaur Jr and Husker Du and the Meat Puppets and Mudhoney and Slint creating a new sound.

294. X Japan - Kurenai

My favourite metal band, my favourite Japanese band, these guys are just incredible. I saw them last fall when they reunited and toured North America. They were sans Hide, the guitar player, who died in what was either a suicide or an autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong. They said they were going to tour with a hologram version of Hide doing all the guitar parts, but then it was too creepy, so they got a stand-in--and because they are the greatest band in Japanese history, that stand-in was the guy from Luna Sea.

285. The Go-Betweens - Love Goes On! (1988)

Twee like tea.

286. Lucinda Williams - Something About What Happens When We Talk

Lucinda Williams makes singing like your friend's weird old pothead mum seem so appealing.

I've been making retroactive changes. Here are a few:

1961:

Fire Night by Ravi Shankar

1968:

Love is All Around by the Troggs

Pictures of Matchstick Men by Status Quo

1971:

Satori pt. 1 by Flower Travellin' Band

1973:

Gonna Make You a Star by David Essex

Morning Star Ship by Jobriath

1974:

Vision is a Naked Sword by Mahavishnu Orchestra

I saw Lucinda Williams in concert a couple summers ago. Your summary is so apt.

Satori is amazing, isn't it? I've never heard that David Essex. Pic from the Vaseline show? Love Swan Swan H.

>263 slickdpdx: Maaaaaan, I can't find it! Have emailed the girl who took it--everything is saved on our hard drives now, right?

And yeah, all of Satori is stunning and so crazily contemporary.

295. Leonard Cohen - First We Take Manhattan

LISTEN to this version. It takes the original and stretches every single part of it out in all directions. It's half song, half melting octopus.

296. Sonic Youth - Teen Age Riot

And memories of the best day, shortly after moving to Nagoya, first time I'd been on a bicycle in about ten years, riding around, watching the life, getting almost run down by these guys, listening to Sonic Youth.

297. Queen - Too Much Love Will Kill You

Sappy, but also just, like, true, right? There's also the heartbreaking double entendre.

298. The Pixies - Where is My Mind

A song that can survive being used at the end of Fight Club with its innocence intact is indestructible.

299. Prince - Batdance (1989)

And the reason I still respect Prince despite all the Jehovah's Witness bullshit is that he gives it his all. Your average pop star gets asked to do the song for a comic-book movie and they produce a Ninja Rap or a Hero or at best a The Beginning is the End is the Beginning. But the Purple One writes a whole album of decent music just so the actual theme song can be a medley, and then he puts together this amazing video with Batman and Joker and Vicki Vale triangle dancers and synthdrums. He remembers that pop stars are about excess.

300. Mother Love Bone - Chloe Dancer/Crown of Thorns

As opposed to the "alternative rock" era of the early to mid-'90s, which you're all about to get an earful of, the alternative-rock era of the late '80s (I guess everything till Nirvana broke?) has always had for me the romance of a vanished kingdom. The romance of older teens. Walking down the train tracks. Smoking. Liking a girl. But like, before you could do those things. Which means that when you could, the way they did it immediately before just seemed so much more real.

Yes, even Burghers dance when old Prince cranks up the volume.

301. Pulp - Death II (1990)

Weirdly incongrous early '90s dark pseudomadchester from my favourite band. They hadn't yet found their niche, but at least they were totally creepy about it.

302. X Japan - Endless Rain

A comfort in bad times, and, as now, a reminder to go get some winter evening sun before the endless rain begins again.

303. Nine Inch Nails - Head Like a Hole (1990)

I resisted, but this song is such goofy fun.

304. The Stone Roses - I Wanna Be Adored

Those four words are the reason for 90% of the stupid shit teens and twentysomethings do. How could you not love this song?

305. The Cure - Plainsong

Plain nice.

306. Lou Reed - Romeo Had Juliette

In a hilarious "studio sesh" version.

Man, The Stone Roses, on the precipice of being the next Big Thing, only to see it swiftly fall apart for them. Great band; great song.

The Sundays broke out in 1990 as well. Here's their hit (but not their best song) off that stellar debut record, Here's Where the Story Ends.

That Stone Roses album was just about perfect. Cure's best albums are the first (U.S. version, actually) and Pornography. Actually is big around our house. The four year old just picked it up from one of his peers and now I'm infected! Bowie does a good Pixie cover. I'd rather listen to Leonard than Bob! Smarter, less earnest.

Who are you? And how do you have my FB account tapped? You've just managed to recap about five different conversations I've had in the past three days.

Jesse, nobody knows who slick is ... except moi ... but moi's not telling ...

Good Lord, Smartini! We almost forgot about The Church!

In 1990, they released a classic, Metropolis.

I'll pretend I overlooked your omission of their 1988 classics, "Under the Milky Way" and "Reptile".

What? It's almost 4:00AM on the East Coast? So? Your point? On the West Coast it's still early goddamnit. I don't care what time it is anyway. Who cares what time it is. What time is it?

>270 absurdeist: niiiiice, I like that a lot. Like Cemetery Gates crossed with this.

>271 slickdpdx: that'd be Boys Don't Cry, then, as opposed to Three Imaginary Boys? I always liked Killing an Arab and Fire in Cairo. Actually is amazing, as is most of their output--here's a Pet Shop Boys I'm not gonna have time for later, but which I always found to be goofy fun nevertheless. Bowie's Cactus is great times, for sure, although watching that video makes me sad for his aborted old-age flowering and his heart problems and the mortality of us all. But I would contend that his best cover is actually this one. And yeah, I'd rather listen to anyone.

>274 absurdeist: oh man, you are introducing me to the best stuff. That's like the exact midpoint between between Disco Inferno (the band) and the Gin Blossoms. And the bagpipes in the Milky Way song, perhaps inevitably, remind me of this.

307. The Beastie Boys - Shadrach

I like rap best when it's just totally phantasmagorical boasting. Which is why Nicki Minaj's verse in Kanye West's Monster (but I don't endorse the misogyny in the video) is currently my favourite verse ever. The Beastie Boys reinvent themselves as minor characters from the Book of Daniel--what's not great?

308. Pixies - Wave of Mutilation

Going to see the Pixies in May!

309. Pet Shop Boys - Being Boring

Ha ha, oops, Slick, I thought this is what you were referring to above with "actually" (the name of the album it appears on) and I hadn't even posted it yet. The verses at the beginning where they go through the decades just slay me. So literary. Years through a sieve, decline of the west, sensory overload, and yet the song is so moderate.

310. Flipper's Guitar - Haircut 100

The very beginning of Shibuya-kei here, with the first successful project of Keigo Oyamada, later to be known as Cornelius. And as a corollary, in some ways, the first seed of the fascination that led to my two years in Japan.

Whoa! Whaddididone? The numbering is all off because I skipped nine spots between 286 and 295. Huh. In fact, "Haircut 100" was #302, and we have only just entered the 1990s, the Decade of the Teenager. Here's how I know:

303. Wilson Phillips - Hold On

The sound of love and comfort to a ten-year-old. Reading accompaniment: Dark Phoenix Saga.

304. Legendary Pink Dots - I Love You in Your Tragic Beauty

Depressing song to post on Valentine's Day. Ah well!

305. Digital Underground - The Humpty Dance (1990)

And, for your consideration: http://homestarrunner.com/halloween2001.html

305. The Orb - Little Fluffy Clouds

Samples Reading Rainbow!

306. Sinead O'Connor

Made for a rainy winter day like this. Written by Prince!

307. MC Hammer - On your Face

Probably I'll take flak for this, and probably it's deserved, but I dunno--listen to it, man. So optimistic. Just a really upbeat plastic-soul pop-rap track. I'd let MC Hammer preach at my megachurch in a second.

279> Smartini, I love you man (do you hear the "but" coming?) but I LOATHE HATE LOATHE that sell out of a Prince song Sinead did. That song makes no sense in relation to the rest of the songs on the album. That was a HUGE disappointment for HS/College radio kids of the late 80s/early 90s.

Here she is two years prior on Letterman, doing her indie/minor hit off her first LP Mandinka.

>280 absurdeist: What's the sellout? It's a good song; it's a good album. Lots of great albums are kind of dog's breakfasts. It's not like she's covering the theme from Titanic. Those HS/college radio kids were too fastidious, man. Here is another Sinead cover that I love:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BxWg9mvY3c

308. The La's - There She Goes

I have been driving my roommates nuts blaring and singing this all week:)

309. Pixies - Velouria

"my Victoria ...." A song, for me, about the junk-shop glad rags of home. Stealing clothes from the costume room, 1996.

Oh, grooveshark! My technology is imperfect and impermanent, and dozens of songs disappeared from my playlist at once, and I have been readding and replacing them all evening. Here is a new addition:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKMA22Hd7J8

And here are two more songs from the bleeding edge 1991, so I can get through this whore from the depths of hades.

311. The Legendary Pink Dots - Belladonna

"Sea-blue marshmallow eyes". This reminds me of The Magician's Nephew in a weird way.

312. Primal Scream - Come Together

I wore huge pants with stars down the sides every day for like a year.

313. C+C Music Factory - Everybody Dance Now

In 1991, on the other hand, I was 10, and my hammer pants didn't make me cool but they did make me bust every move to this song at school dances at the Y.

314. Tin Machine - Goodbye Mr. Ed

My extreme Bowie-love doesn't, in general, extend to his misguided early-90s "hard rock" band Tin Machine, but there's something about this song--the wistfulness, the dying century, the weirdness of some of the lyrics--"Andy's skull enshrined in a shopping mall near Queens" kind of earwormed its way into my brain (like, Brooklyn? why not say Brooklyn?). Clearly I'm the only one who feels that way, though, as the only version on Youtube is awful.

This cat does a great Bowie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fag7oSyTsug
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M46wDXbHE3k&feature=related

That he does, Por. That he does. (And HA HAR COUGH HAR that "Dancing in the Street" video parody.) Here is a thing:

Pulp - Bad Cover Version

315. The KLF feat. Tammy Wynette - Justified and Ancient (1991)

Tammy Wynette sings utopian rave anthem about Dr. Who and ice cream trucks, conceived by the most beautiful band of money-burning anarchists this side of ... who?

316. Nirvana - Lithium

My "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Still so comforting. "I'm so lonely; that's okay, I shaved my head, and I'm not sad."

Here's a late addition for 1982--written and also covered by Elvis Costello, it's about the Falklands War bringing back prosperity to the Merseyside and Belfast shipyards, but also taking the young men from those areas to fight and die in the South Atlantic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh6IwFhG8G8

317. Temple of the Dog - Hunger Strike

Dat ol' early '90s selfrighteousness.

318. Guns 'n' Roses - November Rain

Was this one of city's five favourite G'n'R songs? If not, our love can never be. Anyway, most epic video in, like, history, man.

Robert Wyatt - nice one Martin.

319. Queen - The Show Must Go On

My friend Bin and I had this thing where I was "The Show Must Go On" and he was "Who Wants to Live Forever" and we solved crimes, of course.

320. Pizzicato Five - Twiggy Twiggy

A HUUUUUGE regret is never getting to see these guys live except on the damn fucking futuristic internet.

Twiggy Twiggy - Yes!

>289 slickdpdx: はああああああああい！Here's another 素晴らしい　track for the J-rock fans in the house:　http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PsxtOJbQ1I

321. Leonard Cohen - Democracy (1992)

I keep switching on which song to include from the amazing Cohen album The Future. The Future has crazy paranoid boogaloo (and I'm sorry about the beeping out of "crack" and "anal sex", but I like posting the real videos when I can); Anthem has the line "there is a crack in everything / that's how the light gets in"; Waiting for the Miracle is dark and coiled like a snail's shell. But this one is optimistic and majestic, and for now it's my choice.

322. Pearl Jam - Even Flow

It's not Leonard Cohen, but it's easily one of the five most fun songs to shout in unison while drinking beer under the overpass.

323. The Cure - Friday I'm in Love

drunk

32. Nirvana - Molly's Lips

but now i can sleep

325. REM - Nightswimming (1992)

When I was a kid these were exactly the kind of memories of being young I wanted to have when I was old. I did okay.

326. L7 - Pretend We're Dead

Best first line of the '90s.

327. Snap - Rhythm is a Dancer
328. Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Doggy Dogg - Nuthin but a "G" Thang

Thought you might enjoy this, Smartini:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espnradio/story?page=bracket/rockbands

329. Roxette - Silver Blue

Nobody likes Roxette except me, my sister, and 35 million cold northern Europeans. But we like them enough for all the rest of y'all. Sincerity now!

330. Annie Lennox - Walking on Broken Glass

That video!

>294 absurdeist: hey, thanks! I voted for all the underdogs (and guessed 'em all right!), except Nickelback, because fuck that.

331. Nirvana - All Apologies (1993)

Everyone still loves Kurt, and this song kind of shows you why.

332. Björk - The Anchor Song

It's like, the words to this song describe how every other Björk song makes me feel. Whether it's underneath all currents on the bottom of the ocean, or on a mountain right at the top, or inside a pomegranate being chased by an insatiable killer, her music takes you places, man.

Car parts, bottles and cutlery.

333. Dead Can Dance - The Carnival is Over

Do you guys know this incredible band? I can't listen to them all the time, because they make me feel like I haven't lived the way I wanted to, which is a hard feeling. I don't feel like that other times, so I don't know if they're parting the veil or just playing a trick, but this song is amazing and the video is so Scary Monsters.

334. Moxy Fruvous - The Drinking Song

This sad song is about missing your pal. It was in no way a hit (I'm not sure if Moxy Fruvous made any impact south of the border, but in Canada they were a moderately big deal circa 1992, and the lead tenor, Jian Ghomeshi, has become one of our prominent media personalities), but now it is the second Moxy song that comes up when you search the band. The reason seems to be that it has taken on a powerful and beloved life as a drinker's anthem, especially in memoriam for dead comrades--read the comments, about friends lost to alcohol, and weep a little. If the last one makes me feel like I haven't been living the way I should, this one makes me feel like it could also have been worse.

EPICS OF 1993

335. Pet Shop Boys - Go West

336. Meatloaf - I Would Do Anything for Love (But I Won't Do That)

I listen mostly to classical music, but I can turn on one song by Meatloaf and end up spending an hour or two with him. It was Paradise by the Dashboard Light that first caught my attention.

Robert

That's my wife's favorite song. Personally, I prefer Hot Patootie. Dude could rock!

302 - Definitely with you on Hot Patootie.

That was a good song. I had never heard it before.

>301 Mr.Durick: Yeah, I don't know that there's anyone else really who does what he does. Certainly not as well. And apparently they really do refer to him as "Mr. Loaf". Here's another great idea.

337. James - Laid

It would be entirely inappropriate and probably creepy to go into the reasons this song means a lot to me. Let's just listen:

338. Wu-Tang Clan - Shame on a Nigga

My desk in English 12 had a huge, rococo Wu-Tang symbol carved into it, with all the names of the members etched around the outside. I suspect that in some as yet unanalyzable way, it contributed to my decision to major in English and hence made me the man I am today. Which makes sense, because nobody understands the radical potential of the lyrical better than ODB. RIP.

because nobody understands the radical potential of the lyrical better than ODB. RIP.

Country Joe McDonald, of Country Joe and the Fish, has called 2Pac's "Only God Can Judge Me" the greatest protest song of the 90's, if I recall correctly.

I'm rollin wit' Martin on this one! (Over Joe, not Jesse!)

Bass Strings!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS0owVHwoRM

and, speaking of protest songs, one I can't link on another thread without sending a mixed message. my personal favorite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4ZLkl15_d8
(Flipper - Sacrifice)

this is an interesting thread. I went through all of the martini choices, thinking, but dylan this is missing and dylan that, and only the famous pogues, and what about the rest of the jazz...etc....but it's both interesting in its own right and interesting in the time the dr. martini gives to it

Well said Rick.

Probably my favourite thread.

Dedication to the cause.

(Nice Flipper insert slick.)

Thanks. I love how that song sounds like its going to fall apart any second, every second. Incredible. Good lyrics too!

ODB's rollin wit' you is also effing amazing but its copyright is jealously guarded. Worth a dollar if you can take a bit of hate and a sinister, deadpan, but also grand, vibe.

Someone has got the music loop here, but its nothing without the rest and it doesn't start 'til 58 seconds in.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkBHHEpJv9g&playnext=1&list=PL0F33FEB49D4...

Exhibit 1,999,999,999 that artistic merit and moral value are not related.

308,309> yeah, it's not a bad thread is it?

I was driving home from my slave-wage-subsistence-that-subsidizes-my-existence the other day, and a local indie station that I can only catch for about five miles of my 35 mile drive from the coast to the desert, just before I pass through the hills, played a song from 1971 I hadn't heard since about 1989 (don't'chu love that when that happens?) and I thought, "I think MetaMetaMetaSmartiniMan just might like this!"

From The James Gang's final album, Thirds, featuring Joe Walsh, Midnight Man.

And who is that lovely svelte lass singing backup at the end?

Like that guitar sound.

The James Gang Rides Again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bxVoFp7NKU

>306 Jesse_wiedinmyer: love that track. Also, Shorty Wanna be a Thug--I love the g-funk whine in this one, so sporano saxy--and, a little embarrassingly, Ghetto Gospel--but not the Pacsploitation video. Although my best protest song of the '90s is still a-comin' ... wait till '95.

>307 slickdpdx: speaking of Flipper, god I love Sex Bomb, even if it is their main hit. Here's another take on "falling apart" by the Germs, one I may have posted before but I just totally like it.

>308 RickHarsch: harsch, Rick! I love Dylan and all, but it's one year, one artist, one song, which means one album, one song--four or five Bob tracks seems about right in that sense. Here's a good cover by the Ting Tings of one I love that didn't make the cut.

And as for the Pogues, everything they ever ever ever did is gold, but again--one album, one track. That ends up being the two posted, and I stand by them--If I Should Fall From Grace With God in particular is almost perfect, but I'll still stand by "Fairytale". You did, however, draw my attention to the fact that I unconscionably missed one, and here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuCBfZWYTHQ

As for jazz, please--please! pass on tips. Most of my jazz loves are from the fifties, and I feel fairly ignorant about later stuff (somebody made the same comment as you upthread, and then posted a tonne of great shit).

>310 slickdpdx: here's what that beat makes me think of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl_9ZkzrUkQ

>311 absurdeist: according to the Wik her name is Mary Sterpka. She has several solo albums out, but I can't find anything on youtube. But hey! Here is a thing with a bit of shared DNA with yours (which I liked, thanks!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXnhZx0dG1A

339. Israel Kamakawiwo'ole - Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World

I put the medley on the list, but the video is only "Rainbow", so you can see Iz amazing funeral. Why do we always have to lose these wonderful fat men with their big hearts and their big heart attacks?

340. Snoop Doggy Dogg - What's My Name (Who Am I)

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's dead, and Snoop Dogg's gonna live forever. It's not fair.

341. Soundgarden - Black Hole Sun (1994)

We all had long hair, and we all parted it in the middle, and we all bought guitar tab magazines, but I played bass, because I was not part of the herd.

342. Pulp - Do You Remember the First Time?

God, look at how they're livin'. They're so heartbreakingly beautiful. I've gotta get like Pulp again. I'll start by not eating. Also, apparently you weren't allowed to say "screw" on British TV in the nineties?

343. Oasis - Live Forever

They're a band of idiot savants and all, but that first verse is still pretty undeniable. And then they just repeat it cos fuck it, they're Oasis.

344. Culture Beat - Mr. Vain

But it wasn't all Britpoppery in those heady days of 1994. There's also this twisted dance masterpiece. I will begin to respect norms only when they hang out in clubs like this.
345. Weezer - My Name is Jonas

WEEZER FAN LUVZ WEEEZURR

346. Pearl Jam - Nothingman

Sometimes relationships end and it's sad and it's bullshit.

347. Nirvana - Pennyroyal Tea

Way. Way. WAY. Too young.

348. Massive Attack - Protection

Just begging to be part of someone's trauma-theory PhD dissertation.

349. Warren G feat. Nate Dogg - Regulate

He's not hard; he's smooooooooth.

350. The Divine Comedy - Tonight We Fly

This song has never, ever ever failed to cheer me up. It's fantastic. Peter Pantastic.

351. Blur - Charmless Man (1995)

"He knows his claret from his Beaujolais / I think he'd like to have been Ronnie Kray / But then, Nature didn't make him that way". On of the all-time great pop-song character sketches.

352. Ayreon - The Charm of the Seer

Everything I love about metal, plus 50% more dwarven sorcerors.

I love love love Blur up and until the eponymous album, then only like. I like my metal a bit heavier, but I had fun listening to the Seer.
How about: Lord of the Ages by Magna Carta?

Aw, Nate Dogg died! And right after I put up that video of his finest hour. Here is another--less fine, perhaps, but not unfine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWUMSPekHBE

>319 slickdpdx: the one after the eponymous album had some serious moments, too, e.g.
Trimm Trabb, and
No Distance Left to Run and one other that I will unveil in due course.

And YES to Magna Carta. How about Warrior of Ice by Rhapsody?

Here are some late additions for 1966: The Rolling Stones - Paint It Black, an old fave that I'd burned out on a little but I am glad to see back. And looook at Mick, man. Ke$ha, in this song that I freakin' love and I think it actually has a decent message in the context of the resume- and electronic device-obsessed youth of 2011 (the ones I teach), has this line "dudes are linin' up cuz they hear we got swagger / but we kick them to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger", and you laugh and all because he's horrible, but man. 1966 Mick. Man.

And The Left Banke - Walk Away Renee, because I'm a sucker for harpsichord and beautiful choruses and putting on a brave face in the claws of loss and the name Renee with two e's.

Now, back to the list:

353. Pulp - Common People

The best political song of the '90s, and my anthem. I dare you to suggest one thing, besides harpsichord, that could improve this tune. (Ha ha, and there's the word "Screw" getting edited out of a Pulp song again.)

354. Scott Walker - Farmer in the City

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

320: I like the Left Banke, for sure. Agreed re: next Blur album 13? B?
That Rhapsody. Wow! I don't know whether to laugh or stand up and salute. Amazing!

Maybe my favorite Blur: Theme From an Imaginary Film

Uruguay's Los Mockers do Paint it Black. Wow, Meg White must be a lot older than I thought.

321: V. amusing!

>321 Jesse_wiedinmyer: that was beautiful. But here's how I will always think of Billy.

>322 slickdpdx: the album in question was 13, yeah. I don't know the other at all really. Should I learn?

But that Blur song you posted is just great. Very Divine Comedy in a way.

And: my favourite '60s garage band from South America is also from Uruguay!

Now: 355. Björk - Hyperballad

This song saves marriages, I know it does.

356. Spacehog - In the Meantime

The Langdon brothers have basically had the perfect lives. Skip school and get high and practice in the garage, lose baby fat and develop the cheekbones to cash in on the dying embers of a pop trend, write a bunch of goofy album tracks and at least two stone classics (this and One of These Days), get high some more, quit before your limited talent runs out, marry supermodels and spend the rest of your life getting high. Also: best bassline of the '90s.

357. Radiohead - Street Spirit (Fade Out)

358. Elastica - Stutter

Brittier and Brittier.

At 323 you linked Divine Comedy twice when, I bet, you meant to link Los Shakers!

Elastica I dig a lot. That album still gets played by me, in total, every few months or so. I like the Long Blondes even more
Autonomy Boy
Song not as good, video better
Guilt

A divine tune: Giddy Stratospheres

Rowdier: Separated by Motorways

Dancier: Century

I could go on but it's your thread, innit!

>325 slickdpdx: yeahh, love the Long Blondes. I think my favourite song of the ones you posted is actually "Guilt", but vive l'etc. My favourite late-period Britpop band, though, is Black Box Recorder:

The Facts of Life
Girl Singing in the Wreckage
England Made Me

and the original version of a song they've covered to effect:

The Dodgems - Lord Lucan is Missing

Something else I have a soft spot for from the fin de siecle UK:
Sophie Ellis Bextor - Murder on the Dance Floor

Also rans:
Echobelly - I Can't Imagine the World Without Me

Menswear - Daydreamer

The other "longs"

In some ways the songs that make the top 500 are the most boring, predictable ones, ne. But you are right about Los Shakers!

359. Goldie - Timeless

I used to climb buildings during Capture the Flag and stay up there to watch the sunrise and listen to this epic.

360. Def Leppard - When Love and Hate Collide

Sometimes I think it would be a better, less sad world if all songs were like this. (Other times, worse.)

OMG I am the biggest Luke Haines fan! Def Leppard, not so much.

Did I notice no D.O.A. or nomeansno on your list. Oh well, I'm sure New Pornographers or Hot Hot Heat will make it, won't they?

ICONOCLAST DUOS SQUARED:

361. OutKast - ATLiens (1996)

"and when I'm on the microphone you best to wear your sweater / cuz I'm cooler than a polar bear's toenails"

362. Cibo Matto - Beef Jerky

"who cares? I don't care / a horse's ass is better than yours"

I wonder what Gene was posting? Probably "get off my lawn!":)

I always thought it was "bigger" not better. Butt! I am afraid you are right. Who did the excellent cover of Mrs. Robinson or whatever that shake it like a polaroid picture song is called? I am forgetting right now. A Toronto band, perhaps. That sound.

Thanks for turning me onto the original Lord Lucan song!

I had inserted both feet in mouth (metaphorically, I'm afraid, Peter) up to my knees and was about to chomp down real hard just as I realized that I was about to send the stoopidest comment of the century out into the nether waves. So I cancelled it. That's my story and it's stickin' to me.

>332 geneg: cool:) but you never defined "Stoopid" in the other thread!

#331

Lemonheads and Outkast, respectively.

334:Thanks, that is what I actually referred to but here is to what I meant to refer: Hey Ya as performed by Blankket.

You can hear it here: http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/9947

Also that Barcelona Pavilion song New Materiology with the Rowche Rumble intro. Really really good stuff.

>328 slickdpdx: I'm sort of a fan of DOA, and I have the same pious appreciation as anyone else for their seminal role blah blah blah. Joey Shithead's autobiography is in my TBR pile currently. But Nomeansno are in a class of their own as far as hometown heroes are concerned. They basically founded Victoria punk. They are wonderboys. With that in mind, here are their hoser alter egos twisting the Kinks to hack on our home. Too bad you can't understand the words!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhJgcW7Y8SQ

Here is our beautiful situationist, Nardwuar the Human Serviette. I struggled long and hard and lost many hours of my life with which videos to post, but for pathos and perpective, here's Nirvana. It almost hurts to watch at moments; Kurt doesn't come across as any kind of sad beautiful poet, but just a guy who's a bit of a dick, and doesn't want to be, but he just is, and it's upsetting to him. The black dog is on his face. Courtney seems levelheaded and cool, and Krist seems desperate for someone to give a shit that he's Krist Novoselic and mad because nobody does.

Here is Blur, and I have never thing anything more pathetic in my life. Especially because you're like, okay, cool, bouncing around in the Iggy Pop

As for the New Pornographers and Hot Hot Heat, they are all right, I guess, but not my faves--and they are bros of bros of mine and it would seem sycophantic, right? Here are some preferred alternatives from the same extended family:

Neko Case
Wolf Parade
Destroyer
Immaculate Machine. Toured Europe with these dudes. I'm sure I've talked the Salon's ear off about it at some point.

I can't get the songs you posted to go, slick! Or find them online. Methinks it's almost time for a massive download party. But you did remind me about this.

363. Underworld - Born Slippy

Excited about England this summer. I'm not expecting it to be 1996, don't worry.

364. 2Pac feat. Dr. Dre - California Love

The best thing Mel Gibson ever did was making this video possible.

365. Beck - Devil's Haircut

I keep almost deleting this because it's STILL played to death in my ears fifteen years later, but what the hell, it's a great track, and Odelay deserves a slot. The alternate would be http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Oei-C5ApE

366. the Cardigans - Your New Cuckoo

And for balance, I'll include this sweet album track and not http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9zpnLBtwwg

336: I never loved DOA but they were one of the earlier bands I saw and they came through town often. nonmeansno are incredible and unique!
Victoria (B.C.), from the purveyors of Victory. Now I wanna hear Ray Davies do Sex Mad. Wait, maybe not.

Wow that guy in Blur is a dick! But, no lie, I was listening to Narduwar on FMU Wednesday night, I noticed he had interviewed Gregg Ginn and I was thinking, "How will I know who is talking?" Because, as I recall, Ginn's voice is very similar. Unfortunately, I had to shut down while he was still talking to a Canadian rapper that I do not know.

Speaking of FMU, that link was the playlist, this is the show audio: http://wfmu.org/listen.ram?show=9947&archive=10865

Strike that, I am having issues too. Well. That sucks!

Saw the Machine with NP a few years ago and liked them enough to download some songs thereafter. Something about a ship and something about a phone booth? wrong number? Like Destroyer, not marching with Wolf Parade, though.

I like Neko better with A.C. than alone, but I like her either way. Like the Cardigans doing Sabbath better than their own stuff, but their own stuff is perfectly acceptable. Not big into dancey stuff (not agin' it, either, just not big into it!) but I like that Underworld dubnobass record. Beck I like but never loved.

>338 slickdpdx: yeah, the Parade aren't my faves, but they're a cut above Hot Hot Heat, IMO. Here's a better parade for ya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFLanq3SdHQ

The ImmMac songs you are thinking of are Broken Ship, which my mummy translated into German for the tour, and Phone Number, which I can't find a better video of. Here is another one I like: Dear Confessor.

367. Einstürzende Neubauten - NNNAAAMMM

AKA "the song I just accidentally started in two windows at once and it made it even better."

368. Blackstreet - No Diggity

I got nine types of high with my friend Odin back in 1999 and saw drum 'n' bass dude Grooverider, or was it Grooverobber, do twisted things to this song. It left me with a lingering love for "No Diggity" but not Groove guy for some reason. Also, love that puppet.

>338 slickdpdx: oh, and there's only one Canadian rapper worthy of the name

AKA "the song I just accidentally started in two windows at once and it made it even better."

I used to do this to my cousin with Radiohead's "Fitter Happier" just to try to wig her the fuck out.

It was surprisingly effective.

>342 Jesse_wiedinmyer: nice. One of my great regrets is that I haven't yet provided my li'l niece with cousins to torment.

369. Smashing Pumpkins - Tonight, Tonight

I keep flipflopping on which of the many amazing songs from the Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album to include, but this one has the best video and the best memories attached to it and the best strings. Album of the '90s, PS.

370. Belle & Sebastian - We Rule the School

With added Truffaut, as if the song alone weren't likely enough to make you weep in a crowded cafe at Broadway and Cambie.

Album of the '90s, PS.

Not sure what I'd offer in its stead, but this is just wrong.

Nevermind, OK Computer, Achtung Baby, Odelay, Play, Check Your Head, Slanted and Enchanted, The Chronic, Exile in Guyville, Fear of a Black Planet, Ten, Metallica (the Black Album), Grace...

I'd even throw Siamese Dream above it.

Edit - Of the above, I'd probably go with the Radiohead, U2, Beck or Moby...

Nirvana may have dominated the airwaves and changed the course of rock, but those 4 redefined the possibilities of the musical landscape.

>344 Jesse_wiedinmyer:, 345 well, it's an affective choice--nobody would try to make an affective choice for MCATIS as the most influential or groundbreaking or representative album of the decade. (All the choices above are good ones, and obviously the choice is gonna look different as time passes--I notice Rage Against the Machine is not on your list, and there would have been a strong strong case for them 10 years ago. Ditto DJ Shadow), but I feel like from the vantage point of 2011, the indie aesthetic is well triangulated by OK Computer, Slanted, and something like Blur's Parklife. As far as broad representation of the music and culture of the decade, you could do worse than to choose Odelay. As far as, like you say, changing the course of history and the sense of the possible, of course Nevermind. But as far as lasting cultural impact, I don't think there's any competition for The Chronic. We're only just past the high-water mark of rap's influence on the broader culture (IMO), and the thug thing, though it has faded a little, has been central. I can think of dozens of people from my hometown whose lives would be totally different if not for this album (usually better, unfortunately).

No, I meant that Mellon Collie is the album that best reflects MY nineties--it's not even my favourite album from the decade, and I agree that Siamese Dream is better--but the friends, the parties, the dreaming and disaffectation, the clothes, the drugs, the sound of the inside of our heads. If I wrote a period love story a la Across the Universe, the boy would see the girl across the room with her purple hair, listening to "Bullet with Butterfly Wings" on her unnecessarily large headphones, and she would see him in his Zero shirt, and their gazes would meet and spark and fuse. Actually, I'd never write that scene because it would be awful, but it would be the most true to lived experience.

371. Yo La Tengo - Autumn Sweater (1997)

My ex-girlfriend and I made up a memorable version of this song that went "autumn sweater ... more scratchy than warm ... sometimes ... more warm than scratchy" and sang it every fall.

372. Belle and Sebastian - Belle and Sebastian

How do you find videos like this on youtube? The search issue is problematic. Anyway, I understand that the song is about the cartoon that the band was named after, so here is a clip from that cartoon.

"Deeper into Movies" would be my pick for a Tengo track.

>348 Jesse_wiedinmyer: yeah, 's a good one. They've got such a voluminous discography, I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. Wish I hadn't forgotten my headphones today.

Next, two somewhat arbitrary picks from two amazing albums every track of which (except "The Tourist") is a winner.

373. Radiohead - Exit Music (For a Film)
374. Björk - Hunter

375. Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space

I really thought this was like twelve minutes long. I like it when a song makes you think it's longer than it is in the good way.

376. Notorious BIG feat. Ma$e and Puff Daddy - Mo Money Mo Problems

The great graduation anthem that never was.

377. Cornershop - Sleep on the Left Side

Sometimes I think about how great this song is and how it sounded like nothing before it and very little after it and I miss shit like the Beta Band and the Avalanches some but there was really no comparison and mostly it just feels like a stillborn multicultural-lite future that never was, MIA notwithstanding. Keep your sword hand free.everybody.

378. The Divine Comedy - Timewatching

With a little sticktoitiveness and a stiff upper lip I probably could have filled this whole decade with Divine Comedy songs. This one is the most haunting.

Re: The Cornershop, that is always bundled with a bit of this in my head...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0NhqN0KcWAE

There was a period where "Candyman" or "Good Shit" seemed to end up on almost any tape I made.

(except "The Tourist")

It's almost like you want me to fly to Canada just to kick your ass.